PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 7, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 2004

SPECIAL SECTION

Plantations, ghettos, prisons: US racial

geographies
EDUARDO MENDIETA
Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Stony Brook, NY, USA

Abstract In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucaults work
should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucaults
archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical,
and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related
to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and
ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and
spatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies
of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on
plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces-institutions-geographies that consolidated the
racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US
racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo-history in terms of racializing spatialities.
Introduction
This article is about race, space, and genocide. It is thus about the practices of
racialization that are enacted through the production and control of social space for the
sake of making both possible and necessary the right to kill some for the sake of the
putative health of the social body. It is thus about the normalization and routinization
of genocide. The essay, seen from a different angle, is about how to read Michel
Foucault with American eyes; that is to say, how to read and make fruitful a theory
that has traveled quite far, and across time, which nevertheless speaks powerfully to our
contemporary United States context. The United States has become what Loic
Wacquant1 has called the first world historical carceral society. It is a society that has
transformed slavery and legalized discrimination into the practices of gerrymandering
and gentrifying African-Americans in ghettos. These ghettos, in turn, have been
functionally and structurally assimilated into the prison-industry complex. This complex
has become what Foucault called the carceral archipelago.2 In the first part of the
essay, I present a reading of Michel Foucaults work that links, originally and productively, his insights into spatiality with his genealogy of racism. In the second, I turn, with
Foucauldian tools, to an analysis of the racial geographies of the United States that
ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/04/010043-17 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1090377042000196010

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E. MENDIETA

focuses on four major spaces, or spatial arrangements, for the containment and
regimentation of African-Americans: the plantation, the ghetto, the prison industrial
complex, and death row.

Foucaults Racial Geographies

Notwithstanding the spatial, or spatializing, turn of contemporary social theory and the
proliferation of works that gravitate around the question of space, geography, cartography, and urbanization, Foucaults contributions to this turn have not received the
attention that they deserve.3 A full analysis is of course beyond the scope of this essay.
Yet, we can venture some preliminary insights and lines of approach. Michel Foucaults
work is uniquely marked by its use of spatial metaphors. From the earliest works to the
very last works, Foucault approached his object of analysis by way of geometrical,
geographical and spatial metaphors. In his works, we find a plethora of topoi. There are
discursive fields, conceptual grids, regions of displacement, gazes that spatialize, institutions that domesticate and make docile the bodies of agents by rendering space ever
surveyable. There are architectures of power, and the seat of the sovereign, the head of
the King. There are also the taxonomies and semiotic matrices that render visible the
ordering of knowledge. There are regions, and providences, as well as archipelagos,
landscapes, soil, horizon and domains. There are also besieged cities, with their
environments, and the carceral city with its imaginary geopolitics.4 The Birth of the
Clinic: an Archeology of Medical Perception opens with the lines This book is about space,
about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.5 In fact, while
Foucault was studying the origins of clinical medicine, he considered the possibility of
following up this book with another one on hospital or medical architecture.6 The Order
of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences begins with the declaration that the book
first arose because of the laughter occasioned by a passage in Borges, one that awakened
in Foucault the suspicion that led him to the valorization of heterotopias.7 Madness and
Civilization is centrally preoccupied with the question of confinement and containment,
and thus with the development of institutions like the insane asylum.
His last works on the History of Sexuality deal with the spaces for the fulfillment of
desire and the confessions of the flesh. The preponderance of the spatial and geographic
in Foucaults writing is not aleatory or incidental, but rather methodological and
conceptual. Foucaults concern with space, or rather with topos, is determined by three
preoccupations. First and foremost, Foucault is concerned with how we know, or make
something, that is, an object of study and investigation, knowable, and how this making
knowable is linked to the ability to render something legible, visible, surveyable, and
localizable. Thus, for Foucault, the question of epistemology is directly linked to the
issue of topology, meaning how a place is a function of intelligibility. Spatialization and
verbalization are entwined so as to render visible and sayable, but, in this way, they also
constitute the object of their discourse. It is this spatialization that allows for knowledge
to claim scientific status. As Foucault himself articulated it:
What is striking in the epistemological mutations and transformations of the
17th century is to see how the spatialization of knowledge was one of the factors
in the constitution of this knowledge as a science. If the natural history and the
classifications of Linneas were possible, it is for a certain number of reasons:
on the one hand, there was literally a spatialization of the very of object of their

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45

analyses, since they gave themselves the rule of studying and classifying a plant
only on the basis of that which was visible The object was spatialized.8
A second concern that determines the spatiality of Foucaults thinking has to do with the
disciplinary grid that orders knowledges. Not only is knowledge spatializing, but systems
of knowledge themselves are spatialized, meaning that knowledges occupy a particular
locus within an epistemic topos. Knowledge itself is regimented by being contained and
by being disciplined through the development of disciplines: Disciplines constitute a
system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of
an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules.9 The third guiding
preoccupation certainly had to do with the very institutions that house these disciplines.
Every one of Foucaults books deals with a social institution that is distinctly identifiable
by its location and architecture: the insane asylum, the hospital, the prison, the
bedroom, the monastery, and all the heterotopias that contest the disciplining power of
the legitimate and normalizing spaces. Foucaults archeologies and genealogies of
knowledges are simultaneously archeologies and genealogies of social spaces and disciplines. They are excavations of the plural sites for the production of knowledges.
I must note that in the mid-seventies Foucaults work underwent a recalibration
that had effects on the ways in which space should be viewed, or rather approached. If
we use Foucaults language from 1976, his work up through the early part of the
seventies concerned the how of knowledge.10 After 1976, there is a shift from description
to an analysis of origins, or the production of fields of force within which certain
confrontations can be creative, hegemonic, yet also contestational and confrontational,
meaning subjugating but also insubordinating. This shift has to do with Foucaults
concern with discovering or unearthing what he called subjugated knowledges.11
Thus, the shift was from an analytics of power to a creativity of power, from an
archeology of power to a genealogy of power. Here the term genealogy should be taken
in its most literal sense, meaning a study of the origin or genesis of something. In this
shift, space is not just rendered accessible as the horizon against which things can be
made visible and verbalizable, but also as the horizon that is a field, a field of
confrontation, of struggle and resistance. In this way, Foucaults earlier topologies turn
into cartographies. From describing a topos that is inert, we proceed to an analysis of the
production of spaces of knowledge, disciplinary regimes that encircle and contain
knowledges, and the tracing, partitioning, and gerrymandering of social spaces that
allow for the domestication and disciplining of subjects. Archeology is not abandoned,
but rather is supplemented and transformed by genealogy.12 As he put it in an interview
with members of the editorial board of the geography journal Herodote, the formation
of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analyzed, not in terms of types
of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and
strategies of power. Tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organizations of domains which could well
make up a sort of geopolitics.13
The seemingly paradoxical posture of a Foucault who appears to merely describe,
without being able to give an account of his own locus of enunciation, is now dissipated.
Genealogy is a form of analysis avowedly on the side of disqualified popular knowledge.
Foucaults genealogies are dispositifs of resistance in as much as they bring together
erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical
knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.14 Yet, while
genealogy studies power, it is not solely for the sake of understanding power by itself.

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As Foucault affirmed, he did not write a treatise on power.15 Rather, he was concerned
with the different modalities of power, which had to do with the different institutions for
its production. Behind the focus on power, however, is the preoccupation with modalities of agency, of subjectivity. The genealogical study of power is really a genealogy of
regimes of subjectivity. In response to a question by Dreyfus and Rabinow about how
the works in the series on the history of sexuality fit with his own works, Foucault
answered: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, an historical ontology of
ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of
knowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power
through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical
ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.16
I want to foreground the second domain, namely that domain in which we constitute
ourselves as subjects acting on others. How we constitute ourselves as subjects has to
do with the partitioning, distribution, linking, closing off, mapping, and the surveying of
social space. The spaces that allow for certain truths to produce force effects and
conversely, how certain powers produced certain truths, are spaces that come to bear
upon the individual as a body. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault called the agents that
exercised this power to discipline the individual as a body the orthopedists of individuality.17 In the History of Sexuality, he called these disciplines anatomo-politics.18
This politics of the human body, which is about the making of subjects, is linked directly
and unambiguously to the production and creation of certain social spaces. Anatomopolitics is the other-side of social geography. In this way, the genealogy of the domain
of a social ontology is also a genealogy of spatializing and spatialized political embodiments. Foucault put it eloquently in the following way: A whole history of spaces
could be written that would be at the same time a history of powers, from the great
strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of housing, institutional architecture, from the
classroom to the hospital organization, by way of all the political and economic
implantations Spatial arrangements are also political and economic forms to be
studied in detail.19 A Foucauldian genealogy reveals to us how power produces certain
truths, and how certain truths have power effects. In revealing these power and truth
effects, genealogy brings us close to the way in which certain truths and powers make
certain forms of agency possible by territorializing and spatializing the body of the agent.
In this way, the genealogies of truth and power are also genealogies of space, in which
the power of space and the space of power are shown to be entwined in a furious embrace.
It may be easily argued, without too much contrivance, that racism is a form of
spatial regimentation, a way to enforce not just how subjects may conform and produce
themselves as such, but also how they may or may not enter into interaction with certain
other subjects. As Ronald Sundstrom put it eloquently: Race is not just expressed
spatially, but it is experienced and produced spatially. Race is place, and racial places
become encrusted with racial representations that become all too often materialized due
to racist action and neglect.20 Racism is therefore about embodiment and social
geography. Racism is about how one can and cannot be in a body. Racism is a
technology of embodiment, or, to use Foucaults terminology, it is an anatomo-politics.
Whether we approach racism from the standpoint of the putatively scientific discourse
to which it appeals for its justification, or we approach it from the standpoint of a visual
matrix that renders geometrical and spatialized a certain abjection or approval, racism
has do with what space may or may not be occupied, transversed, possessed by certain
subjects, and, concomitantly, what it has to do with what spaces are beyond reach, and
are therefore unassailable, sanctified, and impenetrable. Succinctly put, racism is about
space, embodiment, and territory: it is about privilege and about building the walls of

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47

exclusion that preserve and render invisible and acceptable that privilege and exclusion.
Racism is a technology of subjection and agency that is enacted through the production
and regimentation of bodily, social and epistemologies spaces.21 The power and truths
that grant legitimacy and stability to racist practices have to do with the spaces of power
that subjugate subjects to the alleged truths of their flesh and the power of the space in
which these same agents are contained and relegated. A genealogy of certain discourses
that elucidates their spaces of power and the power that flows from its constructed and
produced spaces would also, by definition, be a genealogy of racism. To put it
summarily, on the basis of a Foucauldian genealogy we can match the matrices that map
social and cognitive space with the matrices that lash the tortured flesh of agents with
racism. As significant and tactically indispensable as this type of analysis may be, it is
by no means the best that Foucaults work can offer. In Foucaults work we can also
encounter a more condemning analysis of racism.
While it could be argued that all of Foucaults work deals with racism insofar as all
of it always deals with modes of agency and selfhood, the passions of the self, and the
torture of the flesh, Foucault wrote relatively little about racism directly. Foucault did
address racism directly and explicitly, but in the context of his lectures at the Colle`ge
de France, from the academic year of 197576. A brief discussion of these lectures will
allow us to appreciate the ways in which Foucaults approach to racism can be insightful
and useful in an American context. These lectures, entitled Society Must be
Defended, have been known partially for at least two decades.22 The first two
introductory lectures of this course were published in Italian from a manuscript by
Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, then translated into English in Colin
Gordons anthology of Foucaults writings.23 These two lectures are some of the most
cited texts of Foucaults because we find in them his critique of the juridical concept of
power, which is based on the domination-repression model. We also have an extensive
discussion of the genealogical method, along with a discussion of five methodological
precautions for approaching questions of power. The discussion of these methodological
precautions concludes with the following admonition:
we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards the
juridical edifice of sovereignty, the State apparatuses and the ideologies which
accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of
power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilizations of their
localized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses. We must eschew the
model of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape from the limited
field of juridical sovereignty and State institutions, and instead base our
analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination.24
These first two lectures constituted some of the most important methodological and
philosophical considerations of the study of power produced by Foucault. The lectures
then proceed to discuss war and the emergence of historical knowledge, the development of historical narratives of wars among peoples, critiques of Thomas Hobbes, the
rise of a distinctly bourgeois form of power, biopower, and, finally, racism in relationship to biopower.25 It is this last discussion that makes these lectures particularly
important for an analysis of racism. In them we encounter an original analysis of racism
in relationship to a new form of power, one that is not based on contract-repression, but
rather on domination-subjugation. Racism, in short, is an expression of a new form of
power, a power that is both individualizing and generalizing, a power that acts on the
individual by acting on a people as if it were a living entity. This form of biopower

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emerges at the end of the eighteenth century as an extension and supplementation of

what Foucault had called anatomo-politics, which is a power that seeks to domesticate
and regiment the human body. This type of power acts upon the body as though it was
a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its
forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, all this was ensured by the
procedures of power that characterized the disciplines.26 Linked to this form of power,
there emerged another that focused on the species body, the body as the basis of all
biological processes: propagation, birth and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their
supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls:
a biopolitics of the population.27 These quotes came from the last chapter of The History
of Sexuality, a text written around the same time that these lectures were being
delivered.28 In the lectures themselves, Foucault provides a more extensive discussion of
what fields biopower29 seeks to regulate. Among them we find control over relations
between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they
are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live. This includes the
direct effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment: the problems,
for instance, of swamps, and of epidemics linked to the existence of swamps this is
essentially, the urban problem.30 But, notably, biopolitics also includes: accidents,
infirmities, and various anomalies. Biopolitics, in short, is a form of power that
rules over a population, a people thought of as a living body, by attending, ensuring,
securing and promoting its health. In short, biopolitics dominates and subjugates by
making live.
The novelty of biopolitics is that it reverses the relationship between power, on one
side, and life and death, on the other. Classical sovereignty ruled by taking life and
letting live. Its control over death was absolute. The power of the monarch was a power
to put to death, while life itself was beyond its purvey. Biopolitics, in contrast, is
deployed over the living, attending to it as a pastor tends to a flock, and, in this way,
death begins to slip away from power. A destabilizing asymmetry emerges, one that
threatens the very omniscience and omnipotence of this new form of power over the
living. It is the asymmetry between making live and letting die. Death slips away from
the grip of biopower. Racism is biopowers response to this destabilizing asymmetry.
Racism allows biopower to reintroduce the threat of death into the exercise of
power, while making death an extension of life. Racism is primarily a way of
introducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control: the break
between what must live and what must die.31 Racisms primary function is to tear and
create fissures precisely in that which had been unified and made one by having been
seen as a living continuum. Racism introduces discontinuities and caesura that are to be
treated as threats and contaminants precisely because they are gaps and brakes in a
living continuum. As it introduces these brakes into the living body of the population,
we discern already its secondary, but equally important, function, namely to establish a
positive relation that assures that killing is for the sake of the living. Racism both
normalizes and makes imperative killing. Racism affirms that the more you kill, the more
you let die, the more there is the possibility for living, for the living: if you want to live,
you must take lives, you must be able to kill.32 Of course, Foucault grants, this positive
relationship was invented neither by the modern biopolitics state nor by racism. Rather,
this has always been an axiom of war. In war, to live, you must ensure the death of the
enemy. With this reflection and acknowledgment, Foucault takes up the thread of these
lectures: war in society. But this is quite explicit, even if it is not said in as many words:

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49

racism is the acme of the war that always simmers beneath the peaceful appearance of
civil society, and racism reintroduces war, now as a war against the living body of the
human race. Racism is the continuation of war by biopolitical means: it is a war on the
biological threats to the health, integrity, and unity of the living body of a people. If the
people are to live, if a population is to be made to live in health and optimally, then
infirmities, pollutants, dysfunctions, illnesses, diseasein short, anything that threatens
both the natality and mortality of a populationmust be waged war on. Racism is
biopolitics war on the body politic for the sake of its life. Racism was first deployed
against colonial peoples, represented as the other against which war must be waged.
Later, this colonizing genocide is introjected and deployed against the colonizing people
themselves. If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you justify the need
to kill people, to kill the population, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of
evolutionism, by appealing to racism.33 In this way, racism legitimates and normalizes
the murderous and genocidal function of the state, while making quotidian and
imperative that the killing of some, of the others, be pursued for the sake of the survival
of the living, the race, the species, the population. Racism, as a form of biopower,
biologizes the foe and makes total war on it indispensable and absolutely necessary.
The more we exterminate the threat, the more secure and healthy the people
become. Racism, thus, is total war on the biological body of the people for the sake of
its health.34

US Racial Geographies
The history of power is also the history of space, the space within which that power was
deployed and exercised. The history of power therefore has to be a history of local
geographies and local topographies. Such histories will also include histories of the
relationship between industries and the appropriation and distribution of raw materials.
Therefore, these histories will also be histories of roads, lines of communication, and the
development of systems of transportation. In this way, these histories will be histories of
the immigrations and emigrations of peoples, and the ways in which their flows were,
and continue to be, instigated, regulated, monitored, sanctioned or penalized. But,
insofar as the power of the modern state is a biopower, the history of its particular form
of power will be a history of the ways in which it has attended to the living body of the
people by regulating how that body extends and takes up geography.35 In this way, the
history of biopower is a history of a racialized body politic, a body at war with itself. The
history of a people is the history of its biological body, which is also a history of its racial
geography and topographies. Few countries make this as evident as the United States
does. For the history of the United States is above all a history of racial conflict, one that
has left its imprint in the very geography of the nation and the urban cartography of its
metropolises.
The history of the United States is frequently periodized with reference to its racial
question. Following this customary timetable, I will discuss US racial geographies in
terms of four racialized and racializing topographies: the plantation, the ghetto, the
prison, and death row. Following Loic Wacquant, I will also assume that the United
States has had not one, but several, peculiar institutions, which are not so peculiar but
are integral to the very political, cultural, social, and geographical identity of the
country.36 These institutions are the slave plantation, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the
prison industry complex (see table 1).

Unfree Fixed Labor

Free Fixed Labor
Free Mobile Labor
Fixed Surplus Labor

Slavery (16191865)
Jim Crow (South, 18651965)
Ghetto (North, 191568)
Hyperghetto & Prison (1968)

Plantation
Agrarian and Extractive
Segmented Industrial/Industrial
Polarized/Postindustrial Services

Core of Economy

Slave
Sharecropper
Menial Worker
Welfare recipient & Criminal

Dominant social type

Source: Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US, New Left Review, 13 (JanFeb
2002): 42.

Form of Labor

Institution:

Table 1. The four peculiar institutions and their basis.

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The Plantation
The plantation is a social, economic, and cultural system that emerged from instituting
slavery as the core economic institution in the North Atlantic English colonies, and later,
in the United States. Putting the plantation at the core of the colonies economic system
made this emergent society shift from being a society with slaves to a slave society.37 In
the early years of the colonies, African and English were distinguished not by the color
of their skins, but by their place of origin and whether they had a contract. Eventually,
as labor needs increased, blackness and servitude began to converge: as the colonies
expanded southward and westward, there emerged the legal difference between English
indentured laborers, who could provide a contract, one which remained the same in the
process of exchange and that stood in proxy for the laborer, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the Africans who did not and could not provide such a contract, and thus had
to stand for himself or herself as the guarantee of the exchange. This legal codification
of dispossession was biologized when the anti-miscegenation laws were introduced
beginning in 1662. These laws established matrilineal servitude status.38 It is not true
that anti-Black animus permeate the colonies, nor was blackness ipso facto associated
with servitude. The conflation between skin color and the status of servant was slowly
codified in legal norms that had the specific goal of buttressing the power of the
land-owing classes. As Steve Martinot put it, [t]he laborers body thus substituted itself
for the juridical instrument, the contract, in the market.39 In this way, not having a
proxy in the market, meaning a contract, requires that ones own body stand in for the
contract. This resulted in codifying dispossession in the flesh of the indentured laborer.
At the same time, the anti-miscegenation laws established the black body as possession
of the white master and as a polluting element within the body politic. Its presence is
allowed but as the mark of dispossession. To be tainted by blackness entails servitude.
This is what the one-drop of blood rules established, and which incidentally are only
legally codified in the second half of the nineteenth century.40 Thus, absence in the
market turns into legal dispossession, but presence in it is only allowed as property of
those who are untainted. In this way both are now indexicalized chromatically. Blackness
is both dispossession and servitude, that is, absence and inability to possess. In contrast
and simultaneously, whiteness gets codified as possession and possessiveness.41 Just as
blackness is to be property, whiteness is what grants property. The plantation was a
system of exploitation that sequestered and contained slave laborers for the express
purpose of expropriating their labor power. It was a geography of dispossession and
containment as it was an entire episteme and dispositif that simultaneously dispossessed
the black body. The plantation is an institution for spatial containment that is geared to
the maximum exploitation of the slave. This containment, however, is enabled by the
processes of legal disenfranchisement that hides itself behind the veil of a naturalized
chromatic indexicalization that conflates blackness with servitude and dispossession.
The geography of slavery, to use Ira Berlins felicitous expression,42 is matched by a
racial topography that dislocated and displaced blackness into a cultural, legal, and even
ontological negativity.

The Ghetto
To put it in simplest terms, the ghetto is the racial geography that takes over the role
of the plantation once the United States had abolished slavery. In other words, once
slavery, as a legal and political condition, had been abolished, a new mechanism was

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required to contain people with the end of exploitation. The ghetto is the spatial
segregation of the African-American, but it is at the same time the mechanism through
which their labor is made available for optimized exploitation. After the civil war, the
emancipation of the slaves, and the derailed project of integration into white society that
was undertaken under the reconstruction, White Americans countered with Jim Crow.
Jim Crow extended and further codified the anti-Black animus that began to be codified
under slavery. In fact, Jim Crow went beyond the juridification of anti-Black racism. Its
virulence and violence was more acute precisely because the African-American was now
nominally and de jure a free being. In the words of Wacquant, Jim Crow consisted of
an ensemble of social and legal codes that prescribed the complete separation of the
races and sharply circumscribed the life chances of African-Americans while binding
them to whites in a relation of suffusive submission backed by legal coercion and
terroristic violence.43
The ghetto begins to emerge as a space of containment in urban areas as the North
reconstructed (although some revisionist historians may use the term colonized) the
South after the civil war, and as the recently freed slaves begin a massive migration
northward. The exodus to the North was occasioned not just by Jim Crow, which now
has become a euphemism for legalized political disenfranchisement, but also by the
everyday violence of quasi-legalized lynching. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,723
reported lynchings of African-Americans. I must mention that lynching seems to have
been a common practice and was originally used against whites, but as the nineteenth
century comes to a close, it came to be used predominantly against blacks.44 It is
noteworthy that the paroxysms of this ritualistic violence reached its zenith at the turn
of the twentieth century, almost half a century after slaves had been emancipated. A
geographical analysis of the distribution of these lynchings reveals that 90 percent of
them took place in the Deep South.45 The decline of the southern agricultural economy
due to natural disasters, plagues, and geopolitical competition from Latin America,
India, and Africa, compounded with the emergent labor demand brought on by
industrialization in the metropolises of the North, and the policing and terrorizing
violence of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, led to what we should call a massive
refugee influx of persecuted African-Americans into northern cities. Between 1910 and
1960 almost five million African Americans migrated northward, mostly to the Midwest
and the Northeast.46
As African-Americans arrived in the North to the Fordist city of metropolitan
industry, they were relegated and cordoned off in those regions where they could be
accessed as cheap labor and also not present a threat to the property of the white order
of Anglo-America.47 It is significant that the process of northern urbanization takes place
in tandem with the process of racial gentrification. This racial gentrification is overseen
by the state itself through its housing policies. These policies ensure that the poor and
colored are concentrated in the dilapidated and poorly serviced urban centers while
wealthy whites, per definition the primary beneficiaries of state benefits, are granted the
license and funding to flee to the suburbs. In other words, the development of the ghetto
has to be seen in tandem with the suburbanization of the US. Both processes, however,
were strategies of racial regimentation. An overview of the different agencies and acts
used by Congress to regulate housing policies and availability reveals that the government conspired to segregate through its loaning practices, and actually participated in
the very act of destroying housing that was and could have been available to AfricanAmericans and poor people in the inner cities. Martin Anderson has argued in his
notorious book, The Federal Bulldozer, that the government has destroyed more low-

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

53

income housing than it actually built.48 The GI bill, which gave federally-secured loans
to soldiers returning from WWII, and later the Fair Housing Act, and the Fair Housing
Amendments of the sixties and eighties, have been mechanisms for extending the
possessive investments in whiteness and the dispossession of blacks, thus paralleling and
exacerbating what began to be codified during slavery times. The economists Melvin
Oliver and Tom Shapiro estimate that these discriminatory policies have cost black
homeowners $10.5 billion in extra mortgage payments, and that every black homeowner
loses $4,000 as direct result of the 54 percent higher rate they pay on their mortgages.49
Since the 1930s the American government has pursued strategies to deal with the
challenge of urbanization. One was to encourage and finance homeownership through
long-term, low-interest mortgages. The other was a housing initiative that involved the
federal government in the actual construction of public housing. These federally built
structures were almost always located in the poorest parts of the major US metropolises.
These two strategies were deployed over the following demographics: from 1960 to
1977, as the number of whites living in suburbs increased by 22 million, 4 million joined
them by flying from the inner city. During the same period, the inner-city African-American population grew by 6 million, while its suburban counterpart only grew by
500,000.50 As Kenneth T. Jackson noted in his celebrated Crabgrass Frontier, American
housing policy was not only devoid of social objectives, but instead helped establish the
basis for social inequities. Uncle Sam was not impartial, but instead contributed to the
general disbenefit of the cities and to the general prosperity of the suburbs.51 In short,
the ghetto is, and continues to be, a major instrument for labor extraction, but also, and
perhaps more importantly as de-industrialization desiccates the inner city, it has turned
into a mechanism of ethnoracial closure52 that has transformed the inner city into a
region of racial war.
The Prison
The prison is an institutional space for confinement, punishment, and, allegedly, for
re-education, but over the last half century it has turned into a major disciplinary
sociospatial institution that enables dominant status group in an urban setting
simultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group endowed with negative
symbolic capital.53 This sociospatial institution takes over the structural and functional
role that the ghetto played in the first part of the twentieth century, namely the
spatialized racial containment and gerrymandering that perpetuated the exclusion and
marginalization of African-Americans. In Wacquants analysis, the prison enacts and
replicates the ghettos main mechanisms for ethnoracial control, which are: stigma,
constraint, territorial confinement, and institutional encasement.54 Seen through the
prism of these disciplinary and normalizing technologies, the ghetto ought to be
understood as an ethnoracial prison or what Foucault called the carceral
archipelago. At the same time, however, the prison is an ethnoracial ghetto. To many
African-Americans, prisons evoke the plantations of their slave forefathers and foremothers. The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center in New York is named after the
family name of a slave-owning plantation. To a predominantly black inmate population
this fact must have more than overwhelming irony.55
The rise of the ethnoracial prison has to be put in the context of suburbanization,
the implosion of the inner city, the flight of industrial capital, the assault on the federal
government by Republican administrations, and, simultaneously, the launching of a war
on drugs that has made the ghetto as violent and predatory as the jungles of Vietnam.

54

E. MENDIETA

Over the last half century, as the population has grown by about 28 percent, the prison
population has risen by about 500 percent. Between 1985 and 1995, federal and state
governments opened a new prison every week to house the influx of prisoners. By 1999,
there were a total of 1.7 million prisoners.56 This means that there are about 645
inmates per 100,000 citizens, or, approximately one out of every 155 American is in
prison.57 In 1995, the United States was second to Russia for its rate of incarceration.
Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States has a six to ten times higher
incarceration rate.58 Yet, compared to these very same industrialized nations, the level
of crime tends to be lower, except when it pertains to violent crimes. Comparatively, the
United States enjoys lower rates of crime. Yet, it has one of the largest inmate
populations in the world. This has been directly linked to the punitive character of our
sentencing laws, which continue to make more intense and lengthy the punishment of
certain sentenced inmates.
Yet, when one looks at the ethnoracial composition of this inmate population, one
will discover exorbitant disparities. At the turn of the twenty-first century, we face Du
Boiss race predicament, but now in an even more desperate way. Half of the present
inmate population is African-American, while 17 percent is Hispanic.59 But this number
does not betray the level at which both African-Americans and Hispanics are criminalized, stigmatized, and institutionally encased within a prison culture that spells for
them only the accumulation of negative symbolic capital.
The prison industrial complex does not just confine for a period of time. Over the
last two decades as the war on drugs has made the punitive retribution against
African-Americans more acute, the juridification of political, economic and social
exclusion has been exacerbated. A study conducted jointly by The Sentencing Project
and Human Rights Watch disclosed the grim fact that approximately 3.9 million
Americans, which is one in fifty adults, are either permanently or currently politically
disenfranchised due to criminalization. Of this almost 4 million, 1.4 million were
African-Americans; or, in other words, 13 percent of the African-American male
population.60 With a greater likelihood of being imprisoned and criminalized at a rate of
one out of every three young African Americans,61 this means that between 30 percent
and 40 percent of African Americans will lose their right to vote. Thus, not only are
criminal justice policies resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of African American[s]; imprisonment itself reduces black political ability to influence these policies.62
But exclusion is not just political. It is also economic, social, and cultural. Orlando
Patterson described slavery as natal alienation and a form of social death.63 The
ethnoracial prison, as extension of the ghetto, continues this form of natal alienation
and social death through its policies of cultural, social, and political exclusion. The
ethnoracial prison is a landlocked slaveship stuck on the middle passage to nowhere.64
For instance, a 1996 analysis of state statuses concerning inmates revealed that
there had been a rise in the number of states that (a) permanently denied felons the right
to vote (in fact now forty-eight states and the district of Columbia do not permit
prisoners to vote65), (b) allowed the termination of parental rights, and (c) converted the
status of felon into grounds for divorce.66 In addition, The Higher Education Act of
1998 withdraws eligibility for felons convicted of a drug-related crime.67 In addition,
The Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 banishes former felons
from Medicaid, public housing, and section 8 vouchers and similar forms of public
assistance. This act extends the punitive measures of earlier laws that suspended either
temporarily or permanently welfare payments, veterans benefits and food stamps for
anyone who was in prison for more than sixty days.68

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

55

The prison industry complex, which capitalizes on the so-called war on crime (in
an age of declining crime rates) and the need to attract federal funds in lieu of industrial
capital that keep bleeding out of the nation, has expanded into one of the most lucrative
industries. The state of California, which has the largest prison system in the world, has
augmented its budget for state correctional facilities from $200 million in 1975 to $4.8
billion in 2000. In 1994, in fact, the state funds invested in the prison system surpassed
those allotted to the University of California college system.69 The United States spends
about $7 billion a year in prison building. In 1996 alone, contractors began twenty-six
federal prisons, and ninety-six state prisons. Yearly expenses for running this prison
industrial complex is between $20 and $35 billion, close to the annual military budget
before the war on terrorism was launched. These expenses certainly match the levels of
the military budget at the height of the Cold War.70 In fact, such levels of societal
inversion on the deliberate criminalization and imprisonment of African-Americans,
which parallels the levels of inversion of the military industrial complex itself, signal the
development and maintenance of a domestic war machine deployed against the body
politic itself. The prison industry complex is not just a mechanism for exclusion and
marginalization, it is also a mechanism for waging a war on the alleged criminal, the
threat, the pollutant felon and deviant. It is a war pursued by means of geographical and
territorial means. The prison is a dispositif for race marking and race making.71 It races
by stigmatizing, constraining, confining, and encasing. The prison betrays how race and
place, and race and topography, are intricately entwined. At the same time, however, we
see how these territories, fields, regions, and pyramids of power are also mechanism for
war making, in which the more you kill, the more you may live. The more we imprison
the criminal and felon the more we can enjoy our lives. If racism is the means by
which biopower reintroduces the right to kill, the prison is one of biopowers dispositifs
for executing this socially sanctioned and normalized killing. But this is not its only one.
Nor is it the most blatantly racialized and racializing.
Death Row
Capital punishment is co-extensive with slavery and the ethnoracial prison. They were
and continue to be legal, institutionalized, and normalizing mechanisms and spaces for
the punishment, disciplining, and extermination of African-Americans. Again, as we saw
with the ghetto and the prison industrial complex, the uses of capital punishment reflect
topographies of power that seek to police the borderlands of racial encounter and
friction. There is no way to get around the fact that the death penalty is overwhelmingly
used against African-Americans. The Bureau of Justice and the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) statistics make this painfully evident.
Between 1930 and 1990, 4,016 people were put to death by the state. Of these, 2,129
were African-Americans, that is to say, 53 percent. In 2003, African-American are 42
percent of the death row population, although people of color constitute 55 percent of
all death row inmates.72 Between 1930 and 1976, 90 percent of people executed for rape
were African-American. Furthermore, similar studies show that African-Americans are
4.3 times more likely to be given the death sentence if the victims of their crimes are
white.73 The death penalty is used precisely to police racial encounters, and thus they
mark indelibly the racial geographies of US biopolitics. Thus, a report by the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), notes that of the more than 700 executions carried out
in the United States over the last quarter of a century, 82 percent were performed in ten
states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South

56

E. MENDIETA

Carolina, Texas and Virginia). But Texas and Virginia together accounted for more than
half of these executions. Texas, more disturbingly still, executed 245 death row inmates
between 1976 and 2001;74 that is, almost one-third of all executions.75 These southern
states, which account for approximately 26 percent of the US population, accounted for
83 percent of executions. Eighty percent of all federal death row penalties charges
presented by prosecutors come from five out of the ninety-two judicial districts.76
Indeed, the death penalty demarcates a deep racial line in the American body politic
with its particular racial topography.77
We have learned from Michel Foucault that the history of powers is the history of
spaces. From him we have also learned to see the relationship between space and race,
and how geography and topography are entwined with the productivity of power. Power
deploys itself by constituting a horizon of confrontation. In this field, power is resisted
as it enacts its subjugation. Race is produced by the encounter between powers and
spaces in the practices of subjectivity and subjection that makes our time uniquely
modern, uniquely our time. Racism is the name for a technology of subjection, of
agency, that regulates not just how we relate to ourselves, but most importantly to
others, and through them to ourselves. Racism, above all, is what allows diffused
biopower to claim the right to kill. But biopower is social power; it is power over the
social by the social; it is a power over a population that the population itself exercises
over itself via the techniques and technologies of making live. To live, a people must
make the technologies of survival and the health of the people routine, quotidian, and
normalized. As Foucault noted, however, this is where racism is interjected: it introduces the need and right to put to death, but now as a routine, as a normalized science.
Racism makes genocide quotidian, necessary and a right. Nothing makes this as patently
clear as does the use of the death penalty in the United States. Death row is no less
grotesque than the slave ship, the auction block, the tree with its lynched mutilated
corpses, and yet we regard it or disregard it with the neglect that Hannah Arendt rightly
called the banality of evil.

Notes
1. Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the Race Question in the US, New
Left Review, 13 (JanFeb 2002): 4160. See also Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and
Mesh, Punishment & Society, 3, no. 1 (2001): 95134.
2. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1977), 301.
3. Two exceptions are Chris Pilo, Foucaults Geography, in Thinking Space, eds Mike Crang and Nigel
Trift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 20538, and Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present:
Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). See
also the use of Foucault by J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed.
Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), especially chapter 2:
Maps, Knowledge, Power, 51 ff. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996), chapter 5:
Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness, 14563.
4. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 307.
5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Vintage Books, 1975), ix.
6. Michel Foucault, The Eye of Power, in Michel Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 19611984, Michel
Foucault, ed. Sylve`re Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 226.
7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books,
1973), xviixviii.
8. Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power, in Michel Foucault Live, 346.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

57

9. Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, in Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & The
Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 224.
10. Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 19721977,
Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 92.
11. Foucault, Two Lectures, 8283.
12. See Beatrice Han, Foucaults Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward
Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 3: The Reformulation of the
Archaeological Problem and the Genealogical Turn, 73107.
13. Foucault, Question on Geography, in Power/Knowledge, 77.
14. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Knowledge/Power, 83.
15. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209.
16. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 237.
17. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 294.
18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139.
19. Foucault, Eye of Power, 228.
20. Ronald R. Sundstrom, Race and Place: social space in the production of human kinds, Philosophy and
Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 8395, quote at 90.
21. The idea of racism as a technology of subjection and agency determination can be made more precise with
reference to Foucaults clarification of the concept of technology. Foucault writes: [T]here are four
major types of these technologies, each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production,
which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which
permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine
the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject;
(4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of
another a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of
being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom,
perfection, or immortality. These four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although each
one of them is associated with a certain type of domination. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self,
in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and
Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.
22. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 19751976, trans. David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). The French version only appeared in 1997.
23. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge, 78108.
24. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge, 102.
25. See Pasquale Pasquino, Political Theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modern political
theory, Economy and Society, 22, no. 1 (Feb 1993): 7788.
26. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.
27. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.
28. See Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, Situating the Lectures, in Foucault, Society Must be
Defended, 27393. See also the special issue of Cites dedicated to these lectures. Cites: Philosophie,
Politique, Historie, 2 (2000): Michel Foucault: de la guerre des races au biopouvoir (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 2000).
29. Foucault devoted his 1979 lectures to the birth of biopolitics. See the resume of these lectures: The
Birth of Biopolitics, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Volume One,
Michel Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1997), 7380. See the following discussions: Thomas
Lemke, The birth of bio-politics: Michel Foucaults lectures on neo-liberal governmentality, Economy
& Society, 30, no. 2 (May 2001): 190207, and his book Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults
Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalitat (Berlin and Hamburg: Argument, 1997), especially part two,
chapter 1. See also Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London and
Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), chapter 5: Bio-Politics and Sovereignty.
30. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 245. Italics added.
31. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 254.
32. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 255.
33. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 257.
34. See the suggestive if misguided reflection on Foucaults similarity to Carl Schmitt by Mika Ojakangas,
Sovereign and Plebs: Michel Foucault Meets Carl Schmitt, Telos, 119 (Spring 2001): 3240.
35. See David Theo Goldberg, Polluting the Body Politic: Racist Discourse and Urban Location, in

58

36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.

50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.

61.

62.
63.
64.
65.
66.

67.

E. MENDIETA

Racism, the City and the State, eds Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (New York and London: Routledge,
1993), 4560.
Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 4142.
The distinction is discussed by Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 9.
Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2002), 5460.
Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 50.
See Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar
Strauss Giroux, 2000), 35657.
Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993). Reprinted in Critical
Race Theory: The key Writings, eds Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas
(New York: The New Press, 1995), 27691.
Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 7.
Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 46.
Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: The Modern
Library, 2002), viiiix.
Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in two American Centuries (New York: Basic
Civitas, 1998), 17576.
Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 47.
See Loic J. D. Wacquant, The Ghetto, the State and the New Capitalist Economy, in Metropolis: Center
and Symbol of our Times, ed. Philip Kasinitz (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41849.
Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 228.
Melvin L. Oliver and Tom Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1995), 142.
Quoted in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity
Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 32. Lipsitz has one of the most perspicacious
analyses of the ways in which civil rights have been used by Whites to further codify what Cheryl Harris
called Whiteness as Property.
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 7.
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 230.
Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 49.
Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 50.
Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 50.
See Bryonn Dain, Three days in NYC jails: Black Terrorist Thug: The New Racial Profile?, Village
Voice, September 2430, 2003, 3031.
Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 1, 9, 19.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 19.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 23.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 119.
Marc Mauer, Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters, in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral
Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, eds Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: The New
Press, 2003), 51.
Young African-American male means a male between the ages of eighteen and fifteen. Of these, one in
three are under criminal justice supervision. See Loic Wacquant, Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs:
On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States, Studies in Political Economy, 69 (Autumn 2002):
1930, quote at 19.
Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 186.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1982), 714.
Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London and New York: Verso,
1999), 170.
Mauer, Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters, 51.
Jeremy Travis, Invisible Punishment: An instrument of Social Exclusion, in Marc Mauer and Meda
Chesney-Lind, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York:
The New Press, 2003), 22. See also Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the
American Condition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1624.
Travis, Invisible Punishment, 24.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

59

68. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 58.

69. Wacquant, Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United
States, 20.
70. Parenti, Lockdown America, 213.
71. Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis, 116.
72. NAACP www.naacp.org/work/washington_bureau/DeathPenalty032803.shtml . The 55 percent
people of color statistic can be found in a report by the ACLU entitled Race and the Death Penalty,
www.aclu.org/DeathPenalty/DeathPenalty.cfm?ID 9312&c 62 .
73. John Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1997), 160.
74. Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Bruce Shapiro, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and
Americas Future (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 71.
75. Report entitled Geography Determines Death Sentences, www.aclu.org/news
76. Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future, 71.
77. Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future, 70.

Note on contributor
Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is the editor and
translator of Enrique Dussels The Underside of Modernity (1996). He is the author most recently of The
Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apels Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).