The late nineteenth-century and mid-to-late twentieth-century both entailed a radical change in the legal framework of the United States. In the late nineteenth-century, the famous thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments or “Reconstruction Amendments” were passed following the end of Civil War in 1965 in an attempt to grant legal and, presumably, social equally to newly freed Black Americans. Following the apparent failure of this goal, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed in an attempt to close the gap between Black and White legal and social equality. The apparent failure of the Reconstruction Amendments to resolve this gap is intricate problem that is obscured by the simple proclamation of structural
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222). Farley goes on to explain that the structures of legality and policy are always already hierarchal and replicate the power relations established and maintained in slavery. That as the subject of slavery’s, or, in this case, the Black-slave-turned-Black-American’s demand for equal rights reifies the same structure that placed them in slavery, i.e. it legitimates the ability for the state to decide who is a slave and who is not makes slavery a position that is always available for people to be placed within. This means that the slave/freed person produces themselves as a slave (or free person) through the law and, through this demand to be recognized and incorporated, law comes into being and is granted its biopolitical power over life and death. The fidelity to the law ignores that the law in the United States is made legitimate by the ongoing colonial occupation of the Indigenous land and the stolen labor and flesh of Black Africans. The law was created and thought through the paradigm of white-over-black and as long as white-over-black is the paradigm, than the law, itself a product of the white-over-black hierarchy, cannot resolve this hierarchization. The initiary violence of slavery makes rights always already something to be restored or granted, never something inherent to Blackness. Farley (2005) writes that “[w]ithout the experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not
222). Farley goes on to explain that the structures of legality and policy are always already hierarchal and replicate the power relations established and maintained in slavery. That as the subject of slavery’s, or, in this case, the Black-slave-turned-Black-American’s demand for equal rights reifies the same structure that placed them in slavery, i.e. it legitimates the ability for the state to decide who is a slave and who is not makes slavery a position that is always available for people to be placed within. This means that the slave/freed person produces themselves as a slave (or free person) through the law and, through this demand to be recognized and incorporated, law comes into being and is granted its biopolitical power over life and death. The fidelity to the law ignores that the law in the United States is made legitimate by the ongoing colonial occupation of the Indigenous land and the stolen labor and flesh of Black Africans. The law was created and thought through the paradigm of white-over-black and as long as white-over-black is the paradigm, than the law, itself a product of the white-over-black hierarchy, cannot resolve this hierarchization. The initiary violence of slavery makes rights always already something to be restored or granted, never something inherent to Blackness. Farley (2005) writes that “[w]ithout the experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not