1AC---FUGITIVE HUMANISM

Salutations! It’s your uncle, Sam. And THIS is the GREAT AMERICAN game.
Conversations are structured through a liberal fantasy where we HOPE that Blackness
is not dead and dying like America hasn’t worked to overshadow and decimate
progress at every step
Malone 25 Duvalier Malone is a Columnist Duvalier Malone is the author of "Those Who Give A Damn: A Manual for Making a
Difference," a motivational speaker, community activist, and CEO of Duvalier Malone Enterprises, a global consulting firm. He lives in
Washington, D.C.“The Looming Storm: Trump’s Return Could Unravel Black Progress” (January 15, 2025)

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/opinion-the-looming-storm-trumps -return-could-unravel-black-progress/ // newsciabo

The storm clouds looming over Black America in 2024 threaten to overshadow hard-fought, yet fragile progress. As the
nation braces for the possibility of Trump’s return, the implications for Black communities are profound. Our resilience is undeniable, but
our gains—spanning economic equity, health-care access, environmental justice, education and civil rights—are
precariously perched on a foundation still riddled with systemic inequities. The data is clear and sobering: Black life
expectancy trails six years behind the national average, Black households hold just 15% of the wealth of white
families, and homeownership disparities throttle wealth-building opportunities. Threats to HBCUs, looming rollbacks
of criminal-justice reforms and the environmental hazards disproportionately affecting our neighborhoods add further
weight to the scale. What’s at stake is our present reality and the fragile promise of a more equitable future. This
promise hangs in the balance as the storm intensifies. The Economic Precipice. Black America’s economic foundation shows cracks
beneath surface-level improvements. While we’ve achieved a historically low unemployment rate of 6.5%, this figure remains
double the white unemployment rate of 3.3%. In Washington, D.C., the disparity is even more stark, with Black
workers seven times more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts. The wealth gap tells an even more
sobering story. Black median household wealth has reached $44,890—a figure that, while representing growth, remains
devastatingly below the $285,000 that white households hold. For every $100 in white household wealth, Black
families hold just $15. Although the median Black household income has grown since 2011, for every $100 a white
family makes, a Black family makes $15. Photo by Logan Weaver for UnsplashHousing equity remains a critical wealth-
building component for Black families. Yet, only 44% of Black Americans own homes compared to 73% of white
Americans. This disparity, rooted in historical discrimination, throttles wealth accumulation in our communities. While
Black businesses employed 1.3 million people and created more than 48,000 new jobs in 2020, our community’s
economic gains remain vulnerable. The stock market disparity is particularly telling—stock equity makes up nearly 30%
of white wealth but only 4% of Black wealth. Health Care, Environmental Justice Under Siege. The health-care stakes
for Black Americans are alarmingly high. Our life expectancy lags nearly six years behind the national average,
reflecting systemic disparities in access to quality care. We face a 30% higher risk of death from heart disease
compared to our white counterparts, underscoring the urgent need for equitable health-care interventions. Cancer
remains a formidable adversary, with Black Americans experiencing the highest mortality rates of any demographic.
Particularly concerning is the plight of Black women, who suffer breast-cancer death rates approximately 40% higher
than white women despite similar incidence rates. These statistics are not mere numbers; they represent lives cut
short and distressed communities. Addressing these disparities requires a comprehensive approach that tackles the root causes of
inequity in our health-care system. Air pollution containing higher levels of fine particulate matter disproportionately
affects African Americans.Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash Project 2025’s environmental agenda poses significant threats to Black
communities, exacerbating existing environmental injustices. Black Americans are 75% more likely to reside near polluting
facilities, leading to increased exposure to harmful emissions. Additionally, they are the only racial group facing higher-
than-average exposure to pollution from multiple sources, including industry, agriculture and vehicular emissions. This
heightened exposure results in Black communities experiencing approximately 54% more particulate matter pollution
than the general population, contributing to severe health disparities. Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint for the
incoming Trump administration designed by the Heritage

Foundation, aims to dismantle federal efforts that mitigate these environmental hazards. For example, it intends to weaken the Clean Air Act
and undermine the National Environmental Policy Act, which ensures community involvement in environmental decisions. By rolling back these
protections, Project 2025 threatens to exacerbate environmental racism, leading to increased pollution and health risks in Black
neighborhoods. Jeopardized Advancements in Education, Crime The Biden-Harris Administration has demonstrated unprecedented support for
historically Black colleges and universities, investing over $17 billion in federal funding from fiscal year 2021 through available data for FY 2024.
This substantial investment underscores the administration’s commitment to enhancing educational opportunities and resources for Black
communities. However, Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint, proposes dismantling the Department of Education, which could
jeopardize these advancements. The plan suggests redistributing the department’s functions across other federal agencies or eliminating
them, potentially erasing crucial oversight of educational standards and protections against discrimination. For instance, civil-rights
enforcement could be transferred to the Department of Justice. At the same time, federal student-loan programs might move to the Treasury
Department. The White House Initiative on Advancing HBCUs aims to dedicate government-wide policymaking toward eliminating barriers
HBCUs face in providing education. Photo by U.S. Department of Education Eliminating the Department of Education could have profound
implications for HBCUs and their students. The department is vital in administering federal funding, enforcing civil-rights laws
and ensuring equal access to education. The Department of Education’s dissolution could lead to reduced financial
support, weakened enforcement of anti-discrimination policies and increased challenges in maintaining educational
equity. While recent federal investments have strengthened HBCUs, proposals like Project 2025 threaten to dismantle these gains by
eliminating the Department of Education, undermining the progress toward educational equity and support for Black institutions. At the same
time, the statistics on criminal justice remain stark. In 2022, Black people made up just 12% of local populations but 26% of jail populations. In
some jurisdictions, Black individuals are admitted to jail at rates up to six times higher than white individuals. The Path Forward. As we face
this potential political shift, we must recognize our progress and fragility. The median Black household income has grown from
$41,000 to $53,000 since 2011 yet remains nearly $30,000 below the white median. Our poverty rates have reached historic lows, but
structural inequities persist. The storm on the horizon threatens to wash away decades of progress, but we’ve weathered
worse. Our community’s strength has always been unity, resilience and unwavering demand for justice. As this new
chapter unfolds, we must stand firm, stay informed and fight. The choice before us isn’t just political: It’s existential.
Trump’s return to the White House could mean reversions in terms of economic, social, educational and civil-rights progress made within
America’s Black community. Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash The data show that change happens when we engage, vote and demand
accountability. But when we don’t, the cost is measured in lives lost, dreams deferred and communities destroyed. Will we
allow the storm to sweep away our progress, or will we stand together and push back against the tide? The answer lies in our hands, and
history will judge us by how we respond to this moment.

NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOO
TOO LOUD

TOO RECKLESS

TOO GHETTO

Historically, black life in America has been devalued and attacked by America’s
intellectual property system, which is built to co-opt, exploit, and infringe upon Black
people’s work
Feldman 22, Shelly Feldman is the Associate Editor for the Michigan Journal of Race and Law ( March 2022). The
Discriminatory Effect of U.S. Intellectual Property Law on Black Artists. Michigan Journal of Race and Law.
https://mjrl.org/2022/03/28/the-discriminatory-effect-of-u-s-intellectual-property-law-on-black artists/?
utm_source=chatgpt.com// newsci moyin

This post will focus on copyright law and the disproportionate lack of protections the U.S. copyright
system provides to Black creators. This is especially significant given that Black creators have greatly
contributed to American arts, including music and literature, and popular culture. No racial or
ethnic

group has been more influential in the American music movement. Black jazz artist Louis Armstrong,
for example, is said to not only have greatly influenced jazz, but rather all types of music.

It is undisputed that individual Black creators have benefitted from the U.S. copyright system, but the
system’s deprivations have also hurt the Black community at large. Segregation and discrimination
have hurt the overall production of Black Americans. When works lack protection by law, the
incentives theory of intellectual property suggests that creators will produce less. The exclusion of
Black artists from the radio and certain venues led to a proliferation of cover recordings of Black artists’
works by white performers. Many times, white performers ended up imitating Black works after their
creation and performing them in a way that negatively portrayed Black culture so as to please white
audiences. Black women artists in particular, “who in essence launched the modern recording industry
with the advent of blues” have been hurt and subordinated because of both their race and gender.

There is a history of infringement of Black artists’ works in the music industry. European-American
society has historically claimed Black-originated music as its own. The 1909 Copyright Act included
complex notice and publication requirements that many Black artists were unaware of. This led to the
loss of protection for many iconic works, which in turn fell into the public domain to be used by anyone
freely. This was true for Blues artists in particular. Under the 1976 Copyright Act, though amending
these confusing formality requirements, Black artists from the 20th century are still facing aggressive,
expensive copyright litigation battles for their works.

There is also a history of cultural appropriation and economic exploitation of Black works.The lack of
recognition given to Black artists led to the devaluing of their works as compared to white works. Black
artists stood by and watched while less talented white performers economically benefited from
performing their works. Black artists’ managers would also register copyrights for works not under the
artists’ names or transfer copyrights to record companies or managers, depriving Black artists of what
would later be commercial success.

The personhood theory of intellectual property recognizes that the creative process “implicates the
honor, dignity, and artistic spirit of the artist in a fundamentally personal way.” When the works of
Black artists are appropriated or copied without permission, their moral rights of integrity and
attribution are harmed. Misappropriation of personal property of Black works hurts on both a personal
and spiritual level, as many works reflect the intense, personal, and spiritual experience of being Black
in America.

Other “neutral” aspects of copyright law have also harmed Black artists. To get protection under the
1976 Copyright Act, a work must be original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression, whether
published or unpublished. Prior to the amendment of the 1976 Copyright Act, however, works had to be
reduced to writing to get protection. Because of educational segregation and deprivation, many Black
artists were illiterate and could not write. Some styles of music, like jazz, and other forms of expression
tend to be more incompatible with written notation. The low bar for originality of a work also favors
imitation of Black works, as imitators will not face difficulty in showing the “creativity” of their work and,
accordingly, get copyright protection. The idea-expression doctrine, under which expressions of creators
are protectable but the ideas expressed in the works are not, has also denied protection to Black blues,
jazz, and rock artists of their personal styles and the creation of genres like jazz and rap. Imitation of
specific styles and genres, then, has typically not been actionable in court,leaving Black creators of styles
and genres with few legal options when their work is imitated.

Mr. Lamar, do you REALLY know how to play the game?

Then TIGHTEN UP!

Policy debate has never truly offered Black people a fair opportunity, even from the
very start of their participation. When Black debaters introduced unique approaches
to engagement, they were met with racist policies, targeted by white supremacist
rhetoric, subjected to threats against Black coaches, and faced with deliberate
sabotage of Black debate communities. As Black participation in this activity grew, so
too did the persistence of so-called "fair structures" that only deepened anti
Blackness. These structures force Black debaters to conform to white normative
standards. By continuing to refuse to engage with the AFF, you only reinforce and
perpetuate the anti-Black systems that have long been embedded in the world of
debate.
[Reid-Brinkley 2023] Shanara Reid-Brinkley Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Forensics at California State
University, Fullerton “CELEBRATING THE LEGACY OF THE LOUISVILLE PROJECT AND GRAPPLING WITH THE
ANTIBLACKNESS STILL PLAGUING COLLEGE POLICY DEBATE” (June 2023)

https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=cad#page=44 // newsciabo

The first few years of the Louisville Project involved a number of experiments with the form and content of debate
practices. Warner coached his teams to use the topic to talk about the impact of public policy on Black people. For a while they continued to
have a plan-based affirmative that focused on race while using rap, hip hop and spoken word as part of their speech performance. For a few
tournaments Warner experimented with replacing expert judges with lay judges. Louisville debaters were tasked

with finding a person on the grounds of the college where the tournaments would be held and offering them twenty
dollars to judge the debate. It is not until the 2003-2004 school year that the Louisville students and their coaches, Ede
Warner and Darryl Burch, developed the three-tier methodology which would come to characterize the Louisville
Project (Dillard-Knox, 2014; Reid-Brinkley, 2019). The three-tier methodology required the use of personal experience, organic
intellectuals and expert research, in building debate arguments about public policy considerations. Louisville criticized the extreme reliance on
expert evidence in debate competition. They argued that such an overreliance on expertise created blinders that allowed debaters to exclude
the thoughts and concerns of those most materially impacted by changes to public policy. Louisville argued that speaking from one’s
personal experience (particularly for Black folks) offered a different view of the potential consequences or benefits of
public policies that might implicate the well-being of Black people (Dillard-Knox, 2014). Louisville believed that the
common research and speech delivery practices in policy debate contributed to the inability of Black students to speak
about the impact of structural racism in the face of claims of the risks of existential crises like nuclear war and climate
change. For Louisville, these potential crises were used to deflect attention from harms that were provably occurring in the status quo to
Black people. They were losing debates on the magnitude of their impact claims, in other words Black death could not
outweigh arguments about existential threats to humanity. Black death was justifiable. Black people could be sacrificed
if it saved the rest of the world. The Louisville team’s stated goal was to increase meaningful Black participation in policy debate. It is
notable that Louisville did not set their goal at increasing Black participation in debate. To do so would have made Louisville just another
attempt at increasing diverse representation in debate. Louisville understood that attempts to increase the numerical representation of Black
people in the activity would fail if Black representation in debate was simply defined by the presence of Black bodies. The Louisville team
understood that Black participation must be meaningful if the policy debate community hoped to create and retain a vibrant community of
Black debaters and coaches (Warner and Bruschke, 2001). Diversity does

not mean to just increase representation if Black people’s criticisms and concerns can be ignored in order to maintain the smooth functioning
of institutions. Diversity requires structural and cultural change. Real diversity causes shake ups as new voices and new perspectives question
what has heretofore been marked as normal. In the context of diversity, normalization functions as coercion and containment. Louisville
refused both, instead they engaged in confrontational tactics to force those normal practices into the light of scrutiny The seeds that Louisville
sowed have been reaped by generations of Black debaters that have followed. The Louisville Project was an unequivocal success, they were
able to increase meaningful Black participation in debate. Their style and methods encouraged Black students to join offering them a glimpse
into the creative and intellectual opportunities to be had through debate participation. Not only has there been a significant increase in the
numbers of Black participants, but these students have made the study of anti-Black racism a central area of deliberation and research over the
past twenty years. The increase in meaningful Black participation has been hard fought, defined by anger, frustration, and
distrust on all sides (Dillard-Knox, 2014; Reid-Brinkley, 2019). Individuals and entire programs have threatened to leave
the activity in protest of both the confrontational rhetorical practices that characterized the Louisville Project and its
evolution over time. In some cases, people followed through with those threats. Many traditionalists sought ways to curtail the
rising tide of direct-action protests occurring in competition rounds. Measures such as austerity policies cleverly hidden
in the language of anti-harassment guidelines, bringing Black debaters to the attention of white supremacists groups
that targeted and threatened Black debaters who won one or both of the two major national championship
tournaments, secret meetings held during a major national tournament to propose a breaking away from the current
policy debate organizations to form a new organization with rules that would prevent students from tampering with the
normative form of competition ( a very clear example of white flight when one considers exactly who would be locked
out of competing in the new league). The early development of that organization, referred to as the Policy Research
League (PRL) created such an uproar given its secret roll out and the exclusion of any debate director that had students
engaged in race-centered and/or performance forms of debate, from attending the meeting. A secret document was
distributed during the meeting that no invitee was able to remove from the room after the meeting to prevent leaks about the discussion
and/or proof of the strategy to be used to complete the break away from the institutions currently governing policy debate. News did leak,
and numerous parties invited to the meeting, including those with significant political power in the community refused to participate. It was
during this time that numerous Black coaches were being backchanneled and warned that the faction of detractors that
wanted to end the new forms of resistance in debate competition were willing to release video footage of Black
debaters, in particular, out of context in order to encourage colleges and universities that house these students to
disband their debate programs. This effort failed after persistent push back from many in the community across a diversity of ideological
commitments. Despite the successes achieved by Black students in the activity, there is still work to be done. Mutual
preference judging remains a significant problem and one of the most important means of sustaining structural racism.
It is a problem that cannot be fixed by tinkering with computer algorithms. If the vast majority of Black judges are in the
strike range on your teams judging preferences then your team and your university are directly contributing to
structural racism in debate. Don’t go to the streets and protest for Black lives to matter and then use your authority to
discriminate against Black people in the spaces you are in, where you could make Black lives matter. While the essays in this
special issue will be highly critical of various traditional debate practices, it is simultaneously important to note that significant shifts in the
community have occurred over the last twenty years. Clash of civilization debates have trained generations of judges to consider the
ideological and racial dynamics of the clash, resulting in an expansion of the middle group of judges willing to engage Kritik and performance
arguments. That expansion has been necessary to the success of Black Debate. Black debaters have sought out judges that seem aligned with
traditional debate who seem willing to try to fairly adjudicate clash debates. Cultivating mostly White men (as they are the majority
of the judging pool), Black debaters innovate new argument frames and thoughtfully consider these judges’ biases in
crafting arguments. It is this reaching across the aisle that has spurred increases in success. Yet, fewer teams on the traditional side seem
willing to engage in the same practice (a few teams are willing to engage a select few Black judges) of reaching across the aisle to Black judges.
The strength of a “community” is determined by its members ability to value and engage one another , without that
commitment, policy debate will continue to fracture along ideological and racial lines. If we value difference, then we must be
willing to ground it in our norms and practices.

Ahh….. so you brought your homeboys with you?

The old CULTURED CHEAT CODE

SCOREKEEPER, DEDUCT ONE LIFE!

Ah… you done lost your damn mind….

Every justification for intellectual property is logically or empirically disproven –

abolition enables more innovation, equality, and creativity.
Andreas von Gunten, 15 – Master of Arts in Philosophy from the Open University, Milton Keynes UK,
Managing Director of Datenschutzpartner, Chairman of the Board of Directors of EWK Energie AG
(“Intellectual Property is Common Property,” buch & netz, 12-03-2015, Accessed Online:
https://philarchive.org/rec/VONIPI)

As we have seen in the previous chapters, there are good reasons to claim that neither natural rights
nor personality rights arguments provide enough justification for intellectual property rights of the sort
implemented today through a repressive global legal framework. So there is only the utilitarian
argument left — which says that granting intellectual property rights serves the just society as such, as
outlined in Chapter One. I assert that for all types of just society it is desirable that human
communication, cultural productivity and scientific progress serve the development of society in a
sustainable way. Sustainability here means that the just society can be developed in line with its values
while maintaining its resources for the following generations. There is disagreement of course about
values, and about how resources can be maintained in such a way. There is also a lot of disagreement
about whether a political structure is needed, how such a structure should be constructed, and how
much interference with individual freedom would be acceptable to create wealth equality amongst its
members. And values are of course not static but are always in slight modification. My aim is not to try
to solve these fundamental problems but to show that a society where intellectual property is common
property has a better chance to prosper, independently of the question whether its basic values are
more libertarian or more egalitarian. The premise is that the more cultural artefacts and the more
scientific ideas are developed and produced, and the more freely human communication can happen,
the more sustainable a society grows. This is the classical liberal argument for freedom of speech.1
Supporters of intellectual property rights argue that because these temporary monopoly rights are
granted, more cultural artefacts are produced (Moore 2011). There would be less medical research
without patents and fewer new books, songs or movies without copyright, because exclusive income
rights are a necessary incentive for individuals to be creative. This is an empirical argument and there
are many observations which show us that there is not much evidence for its truth. THE MISSING
EVIDENCE FOR THE INCENTIVE ARGUMENT First of all, there exists a huge body of cultural and scientific
artefacts which have not been created to gain monetary incentives but just because of personal intrinsic
motivation. There are millions of musicians, writers, painters, photographers out there, who create
wonderful pieces of artwork every day. But they are not doing it because intellectual property rights
are granting them exclusive income rights on their works. Personal interest, fun, social integration and
gratification, and many other reasons are the drivers for their creativity. In fact, there are many signs

from the findings of psychology and neuroscience that to be creative is a hardwired part of the human
condition. A look back in history shows us that a huge body of knowledge and cultural artefacts was
produced long before intellectual property rights were established globally and that the intellectual
property regime does not seem to be the driver for innovation, as its proponents from the media,
pharmaceutical and software industries often claim.2 Most of the radical works of the Enlightenment
were published – except in England – without copyright protection. A comparative economic study of
the development of the market for printed books in England (with copyright protection) compared with
Germany (without copyright protection) has revealed that all indicators which are relevant to the
justification of copyright show a negative impact. The average price of books was lower, there were
more books produced and more people read books in Germany compared to England between 1710
and 1850 (Höffner 2010:386-388). An analysis of exhibition data from the period of the industrial
revolution showed that patent rights were not the driving factor of the scientific and technical
development. Instead: “Historical evidence suggests that in countries with patent laws, the majority of
innovations occur outside of the patent system. Countries without patent laws have produced as many
innovations as countries with patent laws during some time periods, and their innovations have been of
comparable quality. Even in countries with relatively modern patent laws, such as the mid-nineteenth
century United States, most inventors avoided patents and relied on alternative mechanisms when
these were feasible.” (Moser 2013:40) Another more recent example is open source software and the
open knowledge movement. Thousands of programmers have created the world’s most-used software
stack for servers in the Internet without the exploitation of monopoly rights. The Linux operating
system, the Apache web server and many other programs have been created not because of intellectual
property rights, but because some human beings found it important to do so. Hundreds of thousands of
voluntary editors have created Wikipedia, the most comprehensive encyclopedic work in human history
with more than 30 million articles in 207 languages3 . There are millions of photographs and
illustrations which are published under the creative-commons licences, which allow the copying and
reuse of the material without asking for permission. Most scientific writings are not copyright protected
because the researchers asked for it or wanted to make a profit, but because the publishers want to
exploit public resources. More and more researchers are beginning to publish their work through open
access publications which often use the creative-commons licenses as their legal framework. Public
research funding organisations have also begun to demand open access publications and no one, not
even the publishing houses, would assert that there is a risk that scientists would stop researching if
their works were freely available. One strong objection against my argument, that innovation and
creativity occur also when there is no intellectual property protection, is that it could still be the case
that there is more innovation and creative output with private intellectual property than without. Even
though it is hard to prove, as we cannot test two social situations which differ only in their intellectual
property regimes, there is evidence from historical comparative economic studies that this would not be
the case. As we have already seen above, there were more books produced and sold in Germany
without copyright than in England with copyright protection between 1750 and 1850. In an analysis of
different historical studies about the economic implications of patents Michele Boldrin and David K.
Levine came to this conclusion: “To sum up, careful statistical analyses of the nineteenth century’s
available data, carried out by distinguished economic historians, uniformly shows two things. Patents
neither increase the rate of innovation nor are the best instrument to maximize inventor’s revenue.”
(Boldrin: 2008:216) As I wrote above, I do not assert that such findings can clearly disprove that there is
more innovation and creative output with intellectual property, but they definitely give us important
evidence to dispute the thesis. LIBERTARIAN JUSTIFICATION FOR INTELLECTUAL COMMONS A just

society, from a libertarian point of view, gives individuals equal rights to maintain and develop a life
according to their own desires.5 If the distribution of resources has developed from free and consensual
transactions, it is just6 . In a world where intellectual property is individual property, only a few have
access to the income rights of the ideas and cultural expressions which are appropriated by a ‘creator.’
And these few are not entitled to this benefit because they gain it through monopoly rights granted by
the state. In a world in which intellectual property is common property, all ideas and cultural
expressions are available to everyone. As we have discussed at several places in this essay, I am not
questioning the self-ownership thesis. In fact this thesis is compatible with my argument for common
intellectual property. I have shown in Chapter Two that we can question the natural law justification for
intellectual property rights while still accepting the self-ownership claim that one owns one’s body,
talents and labour. And in Chapter Three we saw that we may need to revise our perception that an
individual has a moral right to claim ideas as his property even if we do not question his self-ownership
as such. One could argue though that for libertarians private property rights are essential rights for a
just society, and therefore the idea of not allowing private intellectual property can never be endorsed
by them. Besides the fact that there are also left-libertarian concepts which question the idea of full
private property rights,7 we should keep in mind that intellectual property rights create rights over
abstract objects and their justifications can be contested. To question intellectual property rights does
not mean to question private property as such. Therefore it is not the case that a society without an
intellectual property rights framework necessarily interferes with the personal freedom of its people. It
is rather the other way around. Intellectual property rights are making it possible to privately
appropriate abstract objects which otherwise would be in the commons. They create an artificial
scarcity which otherwise would not exist. In a world without private intellectual property, every person
would be able to innovate freely and to be creative without the interference of others. This is not the
case today. I am not allowed to put a video, showing me playing a satirical cover version of Michael
Jacksons ‘Billie Jean,’ on my website. I am not allowed to write a ‘Gone with the Wind’ version from
another perspective. I am not allowed to create an online shop using a ‘one-click’ check-out process, as
this is patented by an online retailer in the U.S.8 These are just a few examples, and it is true that I
might be allowed to do all this, if I asked for permission, but we can easily see that such a system
reduces my freedom to innovate. In a world without private intellectual property, no one is
discriminated against. It is true that in such a society someone other than the creator or inventor can
also take part of the income which can be generated from a particular invention or work of art. But as
long as no one is prevented from doing the same, there is no problem with that from a libertarian point
of view.9 It is also probable that in such a society we would not see the same accumulation of capital
from inventions and cultural artefacts because of the lack of monopoly rights. Instead of having just a
few big pharmaceutical companies we probably would see thousands of small ones, as the ideas for
new health products would be copied all over the world in a short period of time. In other words,
intellectual commons would massively increase the speed of the dissemination of ideas, far more than
in the actual private property system. It is said that less medical research would take place without the
incentives from monopoly rights, especially because it is so expensive to invent a new medical therapy
and bring it into the market. Besides the fact that there are also other possible ways to pay the
pharmaceutical industry for its effort,10 it is important to consider the possibility that the ways in which
the funding of the research works, or how the processes to approve a new medical therapy are
implemented, can be changed to adapt to a world without intellectual property, if needed. In
particular, digitalisation and global connectivity over the Internet reduce the need for hierarchical
organisations to run ambitious projects. I recall again the open source software movement, which
creates the same type of complex products in collaborative

networks as big companies do in hierarchical environments. In a just free-market economy as it is

endorsed in the libertarian literature, no one is prevented from participating in the market either as a
buyer or as a supplier.11 There is also no hindrance to gathering the information needed to make
rational decisions. Such a market is highly competitive. One important aspect of intellectual property
rights is that they grant monopoly rights through the state. Such types of de jure monopolies should not
be confused with temporary de facto monopolies which arise because of innovation and competitive
advantage. In a free market economy de facto monopolies cannot stand for long if they are trying to
generate profits above production costs. And even if they could, as long as they are evolved through a
series of consensual market transactions, they are not unjust (Nozick, 1974). De jure monopolies are
unjust because they limit the rights of other potential sellers to enter the market and they are inefficient
because they hinder competition. Egalitarians and left-libertarians would disagree here and claim that
unequal distribution of worldly resources is unjust even if it is the result of consensual transactions.12 If
de jure monopoly rights help to create less inequality, they may be justified according to them. We will
discuss the question of whether intellectual property rights can be justified from an egalitarian point of
view in the next section. That intellectual property rights are not to be considered as monopoly rights is
another objection which can be stated. As long as there are substitutes availiable in a market, one
cannot talk about a monopoly. Intellectual property is property like any other property in the physical
world. So the fact that Gillette does not let you use its patents for their razor is in the same category as
the fact that they do not let you use their fabrication lines. This is not a question of monopoly but a
question of property rights. The same can be said about copyright. The book or the movie markets are
very competitive. There are hundreds of thousands of new books published each year. One cannot say
that consumers have no choice, and if an author does not let you use their work for a remix or a
translation, it is the same as when he does not let you live in his writing house in Ireland. The argument
that intellectual property rights are not about monopolies but about property, as convincing as it
sounds, is begging the question. The type of property to which intellectual property rights are applied
are cultural expressions of any sort, which are abstract objects. These objects as we have seen are by
nature not scarce, and they do not lose any of their attributes when they are used by many people,
unlike physical objects. An abstract object has in fact none of the attributes that can be ascribed to
physical objects. Only after the application of intellectual property rights, through the granting of
monopoly privilege, does an abstract object achieve some of the property attributes that are available
for physical objects. Monopolies are not attributes of properties but of markets. Intellectual property
rights grant the rights holders the exclusive rights to exploit the profits which can be created in the
market for this cultural expression. It is true that property rights for physical products do usually also
include the same type of monopoly rights for such a product, but as this product is a single instance, one
cannot talk about a market for that single instance of this product. When I am the owner of an apple, it
is true, I have as a side effect of my property rights also a de jure monopoly right for this particular
apple. But there is no market for this particular apple, only for apples in general. I can sell my apple only
once and then I have to pass it over to the buyer. No one would say that a monopoly right has been
granted for the exploitation of their apple to this seller. The situation is different in the market for
cultural artefacts. In the case of books, for example, we often talk about the market for books, which
includes all book titles which can be bought. But from the author’s, and also most often from the
reader’s perspective, there is rather the market for a particular book title. A member of the vegan
community may want to buy a particular vegan cookbook and it does not help him much that there are
also a lot of meat cookbooks on the market. An author of a fictional story is mostly interested in how
many of his books have been sold and not much in how the overall book market has developed. There is

no doubt that every individual cultural artifact has, unlike every individual apple, its own market. And
intellectual property rights are granted monopoly rights to exploit that particular market exclusively. It
is important to clarify here that even without the de jure monopoly rights, a creator is not hindered
from gaining profits from his cultural expression or invention; he just has to face more competition. It is
even possible that he creates a temporary de facto monopoly just because of some other advantages he
may have over his competitors. An author, for example, or a musician may create a market not for a
particular song or a particular book, but for all expressions coming exclusively from him. Even if there
are hundreds of bands which cover AC/DC songs, the particular band AC/ DC still play their concerts for
very high-price tickets in big concert venues all over the world. Only if there are no de jure monopoly
rights in the form of intellectual property rights is a real market with many sellers and buyers possible.
In such a market, all suppliers have the same chance to differentiate the product or the services around
it and find their customers. Such a situation would most probably lead to more innovation than the
current system,13 and more innovation is what the utilitarian justification for intellectual property rights
claims as its reason. We have not discussed whether a free market is a just market. That is not part of
this work. What I have shown here is that there is not much room for proponents of a free market
economy to justify intellectual property as they are granting de jure monopolies to its rights holders.
Now we are going to analyse whether there is such a justification for the supporters of governmental
redistribution of the profits gained in free markets on egalitarian grounds. EGALITARIAN JUSTIFICATION
FOR INTELLECTUAL COMMONS A just society from an egalitarian point of view gives individuals, in
addition to equal rights to maintain and develop a life according to their own desires, equal access to
worldly resources, such that the rules for distributing the resources equally amongst its members can
overrule the personal freedom of the individual14 . As we have seen above, intellectual property rights
are monopoly rights which grant a temporary privilege to exclusively exploit income rights from abstract
objects which are created collectively. Nevertheless there are several possible arguments to justify
these rights on egalitarian grounds. First, it could be argued that these privileges are not arbitrary. They
are granted to individuals who deserve them, because they are the creators or inventors. It is not
individuals with the most money who get the monopoly rights from the state, but those who are willing
to bring their ideas into existence in form of expressions. If a privilege for creators serves the goal of
getting a more equal distribution of wealth, it can be justified. A second point is that social justice from
the egalitarian point of view needs state-enforced redistribution of goods, and therefore the state
needs an intellectual property rights framework to redistribute the profits which can be raised from
abstract objects. And a third argument would be that intellectual property rights are rights which help
the individual creator against exploitation by powerful corporations or other organisations. While
discussing these arguments, we should be aware that we tend to apply distribution problems from
physical objects to abstract objects. And in the world of physical objects and a private property rights-
based society, we do in fact face the problems which come with unequal appropriation of worldly
resources. An individual who has more talent may be able to appropriate resources faster than others,
so that in the end there is nothing left. Today, there is not one square foot of land on our planet which
is not ‘owned’ by someone. Whether the owner is an individual or a collective of some sort, there is
always someone who claims ownership. Land and every other worldly resource are finite15 and
therefore there is always a struggle about the question of to whom they belong. But in the case of
abstract objects, the situation is totally different. The use of abstract objects like cultural expressions,
ideas, inventions and so on is not limited simply because someone else is using them, as we have
discussed already. If I build my house on a piece of land, and someone wants to do the same on the
same piece of land, he has to send me packing. He then has the land and I don’t. If I invent a wheel and
use it for my convenience, I can share this invention

without reducing its value for me. In fact any invention and any expression can be shared by anyone
without diminishing its utility for others. The value for me also does not reduce if someone who has
more capital at his disposal than I do is able to produce wheels to sell them on a market. I can still use
my own wheel, which I have created. There is even a chance that the producer of the wheels innovates
on it and makes it better, and as he cannot claim intellectual property rights either, I am able to use his
ideas to upgrade my wheel as well. If there is a demand for wheels, chances are high that I will still be
able to find my market for my handmade wheels, even if a lot of other ‘wheel makers’ are producing
them at lower costs. Buyers do not value only monetary aspects; a lot more is often taken into account
for a buying decision. In a world with private intellectual property rights the rights holder can exploit the
income exclusively; in a world with intellectual commons everyone has the chance to do so. From an
egalitarian point of view this fact raises the problem that the more talented and/or the more powerful
may be able to exploit the profits from the cultural expressions of any kind much more effectively than
the less talented, whether this is the creator or someone else. This is partly true, but it is true in any
world, whether there exists a legal framework for intellectual monopoly rights or not. We can see this
very well in the actual situation in our world. Most of the income from intellectual property rights is
concentrated around a few big players in every market. The main difference is that the powers are more
stable in a world with intellectual property and more dynamic in a world without. In a world without
intellectual property rights, monopolies could still occur but they would be de facto monopolies, and
these types of monopolies will not last long. The abolition of intellectual property rights would lead to a
more fragmented and decentralised economic situation as no one can be prevented from copying
inventions and cultural expressions. Profits will be near zero for those who just copy and will be higher
for those who innovate on the copy. Intellectual property rights are not an effective instrument for
redistribution of income or wealth. From an egalitarian point of view the problem of inequality persists,
and as intellectual property rights are monopoly rights they create even more inequality on one part
between the “winners” and the “losers” inside the system, but also between rights holders and users. If
we consider the situation that without intellectual property rights, the use of any expression or
invention is open to everyone, we can easily see that in such a world a much more diverse market
would evolve. As there are no monopoly rights, probably many more individuals and smaller groups
would use the cultural expressions which are free to use, and remix them with their own ideas to create
new products and services to make a living. With the system of intellectual property rights which we
have in place now, the exploitation of the inventor or the creator through big corporations is the
reality. Only for a few ‘superstars’ might the situation be the other way around. There are two main
reasons for this. First, it is expensive to get and even more expensive to enforce intellectual property
rights; and second, the big money lies in the portfolio of rights and not in the single expression. Even if
there are blockbusters which generate a multiple of the income from the average ‘product’ for the
rights holders, it is usually the backlist, the sum of thousands of single products, which is the important
source of a permanent revenue stream for the big rights holders. But isn’t it the case that the creator
gets at least his share from the revenue stream and without intellectual property rights these
companies could take everything for themselves without even thinking of letting the creator inventor
participate? This is true, but for most creators the share is so small that it does not contribute to
enhancing their economic situation. In many cases they would be in a better situation to generate
income with their creations if they had not exclusively sold the licences for the exploitation of his work
to a single company. From an egalitarian perspective, the most important question is: how can wealth
be distributed equally amongst the people? The intellectual property rights regime obviously does not
contribute much to solving this problem; it rather looks like it does the opposite. I do not argue here
that the absence of individual

intellectual property solves the general distribution problem, but it leads to a situation where many
more people can benefit from cultural expressions, scientific research and inventions than now, and
therefore less redistribution is needed.

Yeahhhh yuh! That’s what I'm talking about!

THAT’S what America wants!

NICE and CALM. You’re almost there.

DON’T MESS THIS…

Thus we affirm fugitive humanism.
Fugitive humanism is the new way that you should think through what it means to
exist as a person and relationality to the world.
Guha-Majumdar 19, Jishnu Guha Majumdar is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins
University. He has a B.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include
colonialism, animal studies, American racial politics, and new materialisms.,“Blackness and Animality beyond
Recognition”, Duke University Press, (december 2019)

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/62351062/project_muse_74914920200312-20322-16jto2y
libre.pdf?1584161591=&response-content

disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DBlackness_and_Animality_Beyond_Recogniti.pdf&Expires=1739491595&Signa
ture=Ic~NQIkMsgDcjhF7IaEUM8O6KILZUkt-BfVoI-ZAj-q-DuknbgWd

7c7DZPmBbgDvLXZgAxhGXjLq7d2SUW2uQE2vn8Sni6EHHqI44-zOZXq

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JdPj4bZ4IvKlAVLFE3MeRdzMRW2K8wWfz9f9GkBWo2CFsWtoCVnCFuI4GqBiyBfCVcXEmqzHlmll5INOSpQ4JOqLPEW
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Increasingly, liberal humanist ideals and the modern regime of human rights seem at best ineffective
and at worst positioned to facilitate the proliferation of contemporary forms of domination. On the one
side, “new” systems of violence afflict the marginalized humans this human rights regime is supposed to
protect, as evidenced by increasing carcerality in liberal democracies. On the other, placing humanity at
the center of ethical concern has enabled the destruction of ecosystems around the world, runaway
climate change, and the most horrifying system of animal slaughter the world has ever seen. Both lines
of domination closely connect to the afterlives of colonial and plantation societies that structured both a
racial order and nonhuman lives and ecologies.1 In these times, then, the ethical and ontological value
of the category of the human has come under scrutiny. What to do with this figure, one that conjoins so
many systems of domination and simultaneously inspired so many liberation struggles? Hold fast to its
emancipatory potential? Turn away and reject it entirely? Render it inoperative? Resignify and displace
its meaning?

Both Black studies and “posthumanism”—each of which traverses a variety of fields—have provided
some of the most provocative responses to these questions, albeit through very different avenues.2
Black studies scholarship has shown how the modern category of the human and the attendant
concept

of liberal personhood emerged from transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism, which treated white
men as the implicit model for proper humanity and enslaved black people as the paradigm of
subhumanity.3 Similarly, posthumanist scholarship in animal studies has drawn attention to the
European West’s consistent domination of and separation from nonhuman forms of life.4 If Black
studies shows that blackness is the “inside-outside” of human civil society, to borrow Frank Wilderson’s
description of the field,5 some forms of posthumanism also describe how non–Homo sapiens
constitutes its inverse “outsideinside.” The trio of books under review—Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog, Lindgren Johnson’s
Race Matters, Animal Matters, and Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman—explore these tensions in the specific context of the relationship
between anthropocentrism and slavery in the antebellum United States. These authors join a growing list of writers interested in the
relationship between antiblackness and the domination of animals, including Zakiyyah Jackson, Syl and Aph Ko, Claire Jean Kim, Breeze
Harper, Christopher Sebastian McJetters, Che Gossett, and Lori Gruen.6 The publication of three monographs on this subject, all within a year
of each other, may signal the consolidation of an alternative, multidimensional approach to the question of humanism: one that posits the co-
constitutive roles of anthropocentrism, slavery, and colonialism, beginning from the intertwined presences of marginalized humans and
nonhumans in specific historical contexts. As such, these texts resist confinement to any one discipline and are relevant to a wide variety of
fields.

Despite similar objects of critique, antiracist and anti anthropocentric scholarship have not always
traveled well together. A central tension revolves around the post- in posthumanism. Some critics—
especially those inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s work, which charts the colonial emergence of the Western
figure of “Man”— charge that the attempt to go beyond or after “the human” moves too quickly over
the plight of those never considered properly human in the first place . To throw out human-centered
concern risks prematurely pulling in a life preserver for marginalized humans just when they may need it
most. It risks treating humanity as a monolithic agent of violence, overlooking the multiple ways of
being human concealed by hegemonic conceptions of the human. Zakiyyah Jackson, in a review of texts also
examining the intersection of race and posthumanism, argues that instead of taking “‘the human’s’ colonial imposition as synonymous with all
appearances of ‘the human,’ there
is a need to “reimagine ‘the human’ as an index of a multiplicity of historical
and ongoing contestations.” Part of the problem stems from the way posthumanism has come to
describe many diverse schools of thought—from cyborgs, to transhumanism, to new materialism, to
animal studies, to object-oriented ontologies, to plant theory—even though one major critique of
anthropocentrism has been precisely that “the” nonhuman is not singular but an incredible multitude of
beings. Another problem is lexical: humanism is already a vexing and polysemous term, and the prefix
post- only compounds the trouble. Cary Wolfe, prominently associated with posthumanism, has noted that the term is not about
being posthuman at all, in that it does not seek to transcend human embodiment, but is rather posthumanist, in that it “opposes fantasies of
disembodiment and autonomy” inherited from humanism. Moreover, it is not straightforwardly after humanism but also before it, in that it
names humanity’s embeddedness in a material and technical world before the emergence of a historically specific concept of Man.8
Nonetheless, it
is difficult to escape the semantic residue implied in post-, and critics are correct to note
that any account of the emergence of humanism that omits the role of slavery and colonialism misses a
crucial, transformative element. Perhaps, following Jackson’s call to attend to the multiple contested histories of the
human, the way to think together critiques of the human that come from the situations of both marginalized humans and
nonhumans is to attend to their relationships in specific, critical historical contexts rather than try to settle the question of “the
human” from afar.
Joining the debate, Boisseron’s, Johnson’s, and Ellis’s texts all respond to an impasse that often occurs when questions about animals and slavery arise. As Claire Jean Kim puts it, mainstream animal rights scholarship often
deploys slavery analogies comparatively rather than relationally, in ways “symptomatic of an antiblack order that depends upon denying the singularity of racial slavery and confining it in the distant past.” 9 Boisseron’s Afro-Dog
draws on Che Gossett’s work to describe this move as the “sequential” idea that the animal is the “new black” (ad, xxi). Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters calls this move a politics of “extensionism” (rm, 4–5). On the other
side of the analogical coin, the idea that slavery treats the enslaved “like animals” is one of the most common articulations of slavery’s essential violence. This description can be helpful if we consider the ways nonhumans too
are

“animalized,” 10 but it raises further questions: What does it mean to be treated like “an animal”? Is that the same as how they should be treated, and does that make a difference? Is being treated like “a human” the opposite
of being treated like “an animal”? At stake are fundamental questions about the precise character of humanism and liberal personhood’s violence and exclusions.

Writing in the wake of a problematic history of comparison between animals and the enslaved, these authors do not treat slavery’s dehumanization of Homo sapiens as a mere symptom of anthropocentric violence. At the
same time, they recognize and avoid the way that claims for liberation sometimes presume proximity to animals as an inherent state of ontological degradation. Boisseron and Johnson are wary of what Cristin Ellis’s
Antebellum Posthuman terms “a politics of recognition” (ap, 4), which aims to secure acknowledgment of a being’s humanity or other proper moral status. For them, slavery presents an important site for redefining the
structure of human/animal opposition altogether. Speaking to this relationality, Boisseron’s text uses the figure of the “Afro-Dog” to give an account of animality and blackness in the black Atlantic. The “Afro-Dog” suggests the
variety of relationships between black people, dogs, and other animals, as well as the system of domination that often pits them against each other. Boisseron explicitly contrasts her approach with a comparative, analogical
one, but maintains that these connections cannot be ignored, “if only because [they reveal] a long-standing trend in American and transatlantic consciousness to associate blackness with animality” (ad, xi).

Thus, the question should not be whether the once chattel slave should claim his humanity. . . . The question is rather how the once chattel slave may be in the best position to challenge this so-called humanity and, in the
process, redefine the meaning of existence beyond the human-animal divide. In other words, how can the black diasporic subject in the Americas abide by a different set of identifications, one that would not consist of refuting a
putative inhumanity, since such regulation validates the accepted (racially invested) norm of humanity’s signification? (ad, 90–91)

The question, for Boisseron, is not whether to draw these connections but how to do so. The book thus aims to be relentlessly reciprocal in its engagement, a “counterbalance” to the instrumentalization of race for animal
issues while mindful of the need not to “overcorrect” by diminishing animal suffering (ad, xiv).

Boisseron constructs an impressive and provocative archive of black-animal encounters in literature, philosophy, political theory, and theater. The breadth of Boisseron’s concerns and source material is remarkable—especially
her translation and deployment of Frenchlanguage material, which allows her to present sources relatively unknown to many English-speaking audiences. Afro-Dog presents its source material less through propositional
argument than through montage or recombination, in that Boisseron’s argument tends to emerge through juxtapositions of thematic clusters of material. Readers desiring a more consistent argumentative thread or propositional
style may be disappointed, but this approach allows Boisseron to build an important tool kit for the text’s complicated concerns.

Each chapter is woven around a different theme and set of issues, addressing, respectively, ways that dogs and black people often “become-against” each other under antiblack humanism (ad, 48),the impasses of sentient
property and antiblackness’s proscription of certain forms of human-nonhuman intimacy, and the politics of supposedly mute human and nonhuman beings suddenly returning the gaze or speaking back. A particularly
illuminating chapter on creolization begins from the forgotten fact that creolization in the Caribbean involved both humans and nonhumans. Meditating on creolized animals, Boisseron posits an ethos of commensalism as “a
human-toanimal and human-to-human relationship that carries an anticolonial, antihegemonic, and anti-anthropocentric resistance” (ad, 107). Commensalism (com, “sharing”; mensa, “table”) denotes a relationship where two
entities mutually benefit without adversely affecting each other, even if the benefit is not reciprocal. Liminally wild animals like stray dogs, pigeons, and rodents, typically seen as freeloading nuisances in the contract-debt
economy that undergirds both anthropocentrism and colonialism, can “share the table” even if they do not reciprocally return the gift.

Afro-Dog focuses on moments of defiance and conjoined struggles, sometimes consonant and sometimes dissonant, for human and nonhuman dignity. It does so because Boisseron worries about a tendency to connect
animality and blackness primarily through abjection and humiliation (xix). While I share Boisseron’s concern about framing liberation solely in terms of victimhood and pain, I also have reservations about centering the sorts of
capacity that underlie a primary focus on resistance and defiance. Focusing on capacities for resistance may too easily lend itself to a new politics of recognition, and it risks forgetting the everyday animals and enslaved humans
who may not have defied their oppressors (at least in ways that we recognize) but who nonetheless mattered. Perhaps a different grammar of suffering, one that lends itself less to victimhood, is necessary.11

Lindgren Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters extends the work done by Boisseron’s text, bringing little-known interspecies connections to light and building an archive of human-animal relations. Johnson examines
vulnerabilities and intimacies between human and nonhuman animals in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury African American literature and political texts. These intimacies, she argues, displace “extensionist” political maps.
As noted earlier, one version of extensionism presumes that racial violence has been overcome and that ending violence against animals is the logical next step. Another iteration suggests, inversely, that only white people can
access the privilege to jump over thorny and unfinished racial issues to address violence toward animals. In both cases, animal liberation relates to black liberation only as an extension of the latter’s mission. The texts that Johnson
analyzes overturn the “zerosum” metanarrative that African Americans have sought their freedom only by distancing blackness from animality. The “fugitive humanism” of African American authors, the instances when they flip
the script and embrace animality as a vector for liberation, offers resources beyond humanist violence.

Race Matters, Animal Matters covers three moments in American history: slavery, via readings of Frederick Douglass’s and Moses Roper’s slave narratives; Reconstruction and its end, via Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman and
the Supreme Court’s landmark interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases; and spectacle lynching, via the images and writings of both proand antilynching advocates. These eras chart the African
American entrance into legal personhood, a putative liberation from carrying the burden of embodiment under slavery into the abstract, disembodied equality under the law. Johnson follows the moments when fleshy being
emerges and slips through this disembodied, liberal personhood and turns the body toward other ends, with and through animality. Thus, she looks less for wholesale refusals of humanism than for crucial turns in texts that
potentially fracture it. In accord with Johnson’s desire to follow embodiment, this approach deemphasizes textual proclamations of animal advocacy in favor of times when authors act as animal agents that incarnate an ethos
against human sovereignty (rm, 20).

Race Matters, Animal Matters is at its strongest when excavating historical complicities between racist and anthropocentric ideologies. Its chapter on post-Reconstruction spectacle lynchings of African Americans, for example,
shows how an unstable discourse of domestication, bestiality, and hunting—centered on the figures of the loyal, domesticated dog and the savage, bloodthirsty wolf— governed these murders. Instead of reading the
bestialization of black people as the simple application of animality to human beings, Johnson unfolds the multiple animal discourses and histories at play. The prevalence of wolf imagery, for example, signals a particular threat
in the white imaginary. Mississippi statesman and ardent lynching defender James Vardaman analogized the practice to wolf hunting: “We do not stop when we see a wolf to find if it will kill sheep before disposing of it, but
assume that it will” (rm, 124). White men, “virtuous” hunters, were tasked with protecting their “sheep”— “domesticated” white women—from the specter of the black beast. Moreover, the ritualization of lynching drew on the
symbology of sport hunting, which saw death as a trophy that validated the hunting process itself. Sport hunting also recognized the prey’s agency in ways that facilitated domination—the overcoming of savage agency marked
white domesticity’s triumph. The comparison to wolves, then, suggests not mere animality but a particular form of wildness that was incompatible with Euro-American civilization and had to be exterminated. The history of wolf
culling in the United States, almost to the point of extinction, attests to this point.

Johnson adroitly brings together a diverse array of scholarly interlocutors in service of her focus on embodiment, including the likes of Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, and Deborah McDowell. It might
have been interesting, though, to see Johnson’s objects of inquiry interact with a significant alternative tradition of relating body, flesh, and text—a tradition rooted in works like Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”
12 and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, both of which inform many current theorizations of “the Human” in Black studies. No book, of course, can engage all the relevant literature, but works like these are immensely
influential and address questions at the heart of Johnson’s queries. Particularly relevant is Spiller’s distinction between (liberated) flesh and (captive) body, as well as Hartman’s explication of the entanglements of personhood and
subjection under slavery, and her caution against the casual visual or textual deployment of black suffering.

Whereas Boisseron and Johnson surface a wide breadth of new interspecies connections, Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman dives into underlying philosophical and political issues in the encounter between antiracism
and posthumanism via fresh interpretations of three well-known antebellum authors: Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Clearly written, subtly argued, and offering a model of rigorous yet open
and generous critique, Antebellum Posthuman explores antebellum antislavery literature’s contestation not only of who ought to be included in humanity but also of the meaning of “the human” as such. These
negotiations, she argues, have much to say about the contemporary relationship between contemporary antiracism and various posthumanisms. Empiricist and materialist accounts of the human in the nineteenth century
declared it just one organism among many, defined by its physical traits. It therefore challenged liberalism’s separation of the human person from its embodied presence and enabled a new biological racism. Ellis shows,
however, that illiberal materialism did not always support slavery and that humanists did not always oppose it. She reveals how biological racism was often a conservative humanist reaction to this scientific movement
insofar as it tried to resecure

disembodied personhood for white men while making the enslaved the “ultimate bearers of the body,” in Saidiya Hartman’s words (ap, 5). However, an “incipient refrain” in Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman did not simply turn
away from these new conceptualizations in favor of a renewed sacralization of humanity; instead, these writers repurposed them for their own ends (ap, 5). Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman also challenged slavery in a
distinctly nonliberal idiom, which contests the received image of these authors as liberal humanist stalwarts.

While Ellis demonstrates great appreciation for these writers, she does not merely celebrate the presence of antislavery materialisms but carefully attends to the difficulties and unanswered questions they raise. Douglass’s
writings in the 1850s, for example, speculate about a “reflexive urge that is built into the structure of organic life” that opposes slavery, suggesting that it “may originate in forces that are not human at all” (ap, 50, 55); yet Ellis
charts how this move displaces questions of racial equality and Douglass’s concern for the unique value of human belonging (ap, 56). Similarly, Thoreau’s writings on John Brown suggest that Brown succeeded insofar as he
planted the “seeds” of change that, with the guidance of inhuman material forces, would gradually transform society; however, this avowal threatens to render the individual politically passive because their personal will is
insignificant compared to such broad processes. Finally, Whitman’s poetry aligns a being’s value with its opacity and with infinite, impersonal entanglements, both human and nonhuman, rather than with a disembodied person,
but again, as Ellis shows, this valuation makes it difficult to assess why any being ought specifically to be valued, to know what is due “to human bodies as opposed to grass or blood or a poem” (ap, 131). While tensions between
racial equality and materialist ontologies come to the fore more clearly in antebellum antislavery texts, Ellis argues that any effort to reconcile posthumanism’s inattentiveness to race must grapple with these problems. She
ultimately suggests that posthumanism is an antiracism that does not consistently recognize itself as such (ap, 145), and that what she calls social justice theories, for which Wynter’s work is her primary example, could be
considered posthumanism in that they seek to move beyond the present humanist order of Man (ap, 149). However, these tensions remain unresolved in Ellis’s text partly because of difficulties in deriving politics and ethics from
posthumanist ontologies, and partly due to a conflation between the idea of the human as biological entity, Homo sapiens, and as an ideological construction (and conversely a conflation of the nonhuman and the non–Homo
sapiens). If posthumanism sometimes understands itself to defend nonhumans qua non–Homo sapiens, its critics suggest that it presumes a monolithic “human” carrying out this violence rather than attending to the ongoing
violence against those Homo sapiens reduced to an ideologically “nonhuman” status. Conversely, antiracist theorists sometimes treat dehumanization as a category mistake, insisting that the “moral category is in truth natural:
that all Homo sapiens are human” (ap, 137).13 Ellis, troubling both theorizations, suggests that we decouple the ideological category of “the Human” from Homo sapiens.

Ellis worries that her distinction between the speciological and ideological concepts of the human might be too simplistic. However, this very simplicity provides a clear and useful heuristic for cutting through knots tied by the
category’s multiple, often contradictory deployments. While analytically useful, it may be risky to take her implicit separation between the biological and ideological too far. Sometimes Ellis seems to suggest, at least rhetorically,
that we ought not think about the relevance of humanity as Homo sapiens at all but instead should address the ideological, cross-species category of the Human. She suggests that Jacques Derrida, in “The Animal That Therefore I
Am,” argues that “the human/nonhuman binary is not, in fact, a speciological distinction but rather an ideological one” (144). However, another way of reading Derrida’s essay is that while the human/animal binary concerns
many elements beyond species, its speciological dimension is irreducible to pure ideology: in other words, the binary is crosscut by many others and is not a singular, unbroken line. Moreover, many other posthumanist scholars
whom Ellis sympathizes with argue precisely that it is impossible to totally disentangle the ideological from the biological.14 Instead— and I believe this is consonant with Ellis’s overall approach—it may be necessary to deny
transcendental value to the Homo sapiens form and to avoid reifying it as an abstraction, while taking care not to treat it as merely arbitrary or to flatten the bumps and textures of material differences within. It would then be a
matter of thinking about invocations of the human in different registers, rather than picking either the biological or the ideological as the privileged locus of critique.

Together, Afro-Dog; Race Matters, Animal Matters; and Antebellum Posthuman push the conversation about the structures of antiblackness and anthropocentrism further and return us to the question raised at the beginning of
this review: What should we do with the human and with humanism? The texts broach but do not resolve this question, which is broader than any single text’s purview, but they are helpful to think with and alongside. With
regard to criticisms of posthumanism, these three texts occupy different, though adjacent, positions. Boisseron does not explicitly address the issue, but she tends to use the word posthuman with a neutral or positive valence.
Johnson and Ellis make sympathetic criticisms of posthumanism. In line with other critics, Johnson places the importance of marginalized people moving into the human (rm, 16). Ellis offers a slightly different argument. She
notes that the tendency of posthumanism, or at least a certain strand of it, to valorize open-endedness, changefulness, and lines of flight is not in itself an ethics or a politics (ap, 165). She lands on the tentative conclusion that
posthumanism contributes to social justice by ungrounding dogma, reminding us of all the forces that exceed human control. It shows us that our map of the world is a medieval one, “pointing to the unknown in all directions . . .
on the scale of incomputable cosmic complexity” (ap, 169).

This characterization, and Ellis’s underlying argument that politics cannot be cleanly derived from ontological visions, makes good sense—but I find myself dissatisfied with the
two implicit options of either grounding politics or ungrounding skepticism. Neither pure abstraction nor political directive, these visions can be pragmatic endeavors insofar as
they emerge out of practices and engagements with politics and the world. It is hard to conceive of a politics or ethics that does not simultaneously make some ontological or
metaphysical assumptions, and these differences matter for political outcomes.15 The project of animal studies throws this into relief: the question of how animals ought to be
treated is nearly impossible to separate from assumptions about the type of beings that they are, or whether the ontological grammar implied by type of being is even suitable
in the first place. In the face of spaces of unimaginable abjection such as factory farms and slave plantations, new ontological visions emerge not because they are
transcendentally “true” but because the present truth is intolerable and a new ceremony must be found, to borrow Wynter’s memorable phrasing.16

In response to posthumanism’s problems with race, some critics instead call for resignification and a
“new” humanism, one that does not rely on dominating nonhumans, offers an open and entangled
account of human existence, and is truly “made to the measure of the world,” as Aimé Cesaire has famously
written.17 But it is not always clear to what extent these calls, once they avow a mode of human being not hierarchically positioned over
nonhumans, are humanisms per se. What meaning might the suffix take on that would keep it from implying the bounded centrality of
human concern?

Johnson’s sympathetic critique of posthumanism leads her to opt for a “fugitive humanism,” as
described above, which to some extent follows the path of charting new humanisms. Fugitive
humanism is innovative insofar as it offers a mode of affirmative reading that listens for subterranean
movements, neither dogmatically adhering to texts’ humanist surfaces nor condescendingly waving
them away. It evokes a humanism that is never quite itself, one that is always on the move. Johnson’s
focus on showing the presence of fugitive humanist subversions between the zero-sum equation
between black and animal liberation is an essential step, but it also raises the question of what to do and how to
mobilize these moments to shape the politics of the present. Moreover, the question remains: To what extent is fugitive
humanism a humanism at all? Johnson’s answer might be that though these movements try to resist aspects of humanism,
they also seek its necessary and life-sustaining privileges (rm, 14). But perhaps fugitivity outstrips the human? No doubt the
writers she examines want to hold on to vestiges of humanism, because there is not always another choice, but perhaps these
fugitive moments exceed rather than come back to the humanism they emerge from.