Jackie Wang
Jackie Wang is a writer, poet, musician, and academic whose writing has been published by Lies Journal, HTML Giant, and BOMBlog. She also has a blog, Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns, and is currently working on a book for Semiotext(e).
Against Innocence
The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men-the bad ones-and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out.
published on the occasion of the 2014 Whitney Biennial