Children like Aylan Kurdi are disposable in the world’s imagination. Over a thousand Syrian children have died in this conflict. Tens of thousands of children die in conflicts around the world. The United Nations estimates that half of all deaths in conflict zones are of children. In 1995, UNICEF reported that two million children had died in conflicts over the previous decade. The rate has not decreased. The statistic harms the consciousness.

But it is the picture of Aylan Kurdi that has unsettled our ethics – does the world really care about the damage done to children as a result of war and diabolical trade policies? The evidence suggests that the world does not care at all. What care there is comes in the brief instance when we glance at a photograph such as that of the dead body of Aylan Kurdi. He breaks our heart. But he will do little to change our politics. More

If my left eco-socialist politics and world view were combined with evangelical Christianity of the sin and damnation sort (I remain, alas, a quiet atheist), I would predict that Barack Obama will have a very long life since it would take Satan’s engineers many decades to construct a dungeon in Hell hot enough for the current U.S. president. Among the many things that stations Obama beneath the lowest snails on Earth is his special, arch-cynical penchant for potently pretending to be something he isn’t: a progressive. He is the ultimate fake-progressive poseur – an unmatched epitome of the nauseating triumph of symbol over substance and of words over deeds.

Take his great show of concern last summer for the appalling national crime and embarrassment that is the United States’ shockingly high rate of racially disparate mass imprisonment and criminal branding (“the New Jim Crow”). Two years and seven months into his second presidential term, Obama walked with great fanfare into a federal lock-up and stood in mock horror before one of its grim solitary confinement cells. He went to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) to proclaim his purported recent discovery that “mass incarceration makes our country worse and [that] we need to do something about it.” Beneath the praise and fanfare his performance evoked, what has the President actually done for the nation’s vast army of Black prisoners and marked-for-life felons? Nothing, or next to it. More

There was a time in the United States Empire, when Afrikan people, aka, Black people, were deemed to be extremely valuable to the “American project”, when our lives as it is said, “mattered”. This “time” was the era of chattel slavery, when the labor provided by Afrikan people was indispensable to the settler-colonial enterprise, accounting for nearly half of the commodified value produced within its holdings and exchanged in “domestic” and international markets. Our ancestors were held and regarded as prize horses or bulls, something to be treated with a degree of “care” (i.e. enough to ensure that they were able to work and reproduce their labor, and produce value for their enslavers) because of their centrality to the processes of material production.

What mattered was Black labor power and how it could be harnessed and controlled, not Afrikan humanity. Afrikan humanity did not matter – it had to be denied in order create and sustain the social rationale and systemic dynamics that allowed for the commodification of human beings. These “dynamics” included armed militias and slave patrols, iron-clad non-exception social clauses like the “one-drop” rule, the slave codes, vagrancy laws, and a complex mix of laws and social customs all aimed at oppressing, controlling and scientifically exploiting Black life and labor to the maximum degree. This systemic need served the variants of white supremacy, colonial subjugation, and imperialism that capitalism built to govern social relations in the United States. All of the fundamental systems created to control Afrikan life and labor between the 17th and 19th centuries are still in operation today, despite a few surface moderations, and serve the same basic functions. More