T. Anansi Wilson | University of Kansas (original) (raw)

Papers by T. Anansi Wilson

Social Science Research Network, 2021

“Sexual Profiling” explores the concept of BlaQueer Furtivity and argues that the scrutinization ... more “Sexual Profiling” explores the concept of BlaQueer Furtivity and argues that the scrutinization and profiling of BlaQueer people is the result of both intramural and state violence that collude, collide and compound with each other. Sexual profiling explores how BlaQueer people are rendered particularly furtive and in and outside of laws that are not merely “double violences” but instead unique, narrow affronts to BlaQueer being, freedom and self-actualization. Sexual Profiling: BlaQueers On The Run is primarily concerned with how intramural and state violence collude and collide to render BlaQueer people particularly furtive and uniquely scrutinized in and outside of Black spaces by the dynamic powers of state policing, deputizing whiteness and Black folks reenacting state and private violence. It does so by examining personal experiences, the movie "Moonlight," the phenomena of "walking while trans" laws and the life of William Dorssey Swan, for former slave and America's first drag queen, to mark the surveillence, racial-sexual terror and intramural and state sanctioned violence against BlaQueer people from slavery to the present.

Social Science Research Network, May 1, 2021

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters; Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (&quo... more This dissertation is comprised of three chapters; Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being ("Furtive Blackness"), The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life ("Strict Scrutiny") and Sexual Profiling: BlaQueer Furtivity. It takes a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. This work is about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black—and BlaQueer—in black letter law.

Social Science Research Network, Oct 8, 2020

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being ("Furtive Blackness") and The Strict Scrutiny of Black ... more Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being ("Furtive Blackness") and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life ("Strict Scrutiny") take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. These articles are about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black in black letter law. 1. T. Anansi Wilson is an affiliated scholar and adjunct professor of law at UC Hastings College of the Law. They are also a Ph.D. Candidate in African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. These articles originated in material form as draft dissertation chapters, yet their style, concerns and politics originate in the work of earlier Black and BlaQueer scholar-creator activists such as Toni Morrison,

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

and received their JD from Howard Law School. These articles originated in material form as draft... more and received their JD from Howard Law School. These articles originated in material form as draft dissertation chapters, yet their style, concerns and politics originate in the work and living practices of earlier Black and BlaQueer scholar-creator activists such as Toni Morrison,

Social Science Research Network, May 1, 2021

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice, 2022

This article has taken some time to recollect. I have been struggling to find the grammar to comm... more This article has taken some time to recollect. I have been struggling to find the grammar to communicate a phenomenon that is both central to BlaQueer life and beyond BlaQueer living. This difficulty, the silences, the gaps, the nonsensical and agrammatical nature of this phenomena—that of BlaQueer furtivity, the strict scrutiny of Black life and sexual profiling—are central features not only of this project but of the legal, extralegal and social logics and powers that mark, make and remake BlaQueer folks as always, already furtive, subject to strict scrutiny and necessarily sexual profiling. I have been struggling with whether to tell this story, to explicate this project, from the site of my own body—in the history and vein of other BlaQueer folks before me, such as Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill—or whether to center and utilize a BlaQueer analytic to read and re-read various scenes of subjection and renderings in order to uncover experiences, realities and systems that have generally remained known but unspeakable; known to the bodies of those that live them, but unspeakable because a grammar, let alone a legal grammar, has not yet fully developed to communicate these things. They reside in the bodies, the knowings and the spirits of BlaQueer people. Therefore, this project is less a proclamation, but a witnessing, a recalling and a collection of knowings, groans and utterings that can only be communicated through a combination of theories of the flesh, memory and rememory attempting to make themselves heard through a logic and language unkind and hostile to BlaQueer life, living and testimony. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative.

Though based in, and centrally concerned with law, this project refuses to reenact the ontological violence that grammar of jurisprudence routinely exhibits on Black and BlaQueer people. To that end, I’ve chosen to employ the personal, the cinematic and the affective and couple them with the legal, the mythological and scenes from BlaQueer life, both past and present. Here, I’m attempting to not only answer the call of Christina Sharpe and “defend the dead” but to also speak the truth of the living and the lies of the law. In the historical vein of the works of ancestral truth tellers Ida Wells and her “A Red Record”; David Walker and his “Appeal To Coloured Peoples of The World”; Essex Hemphill and “American Ceremonies” and the countless works and utterances of Toni Morrison, Pauline Murry and Maya Angelou.

The archive that I am working with and through is textual, fleshy and artistic; this archive is the tapestry of Black and BlaQueer life, living, striving and dying. I am using material that arises from the experiences of “the dead, the dying, and those living lives consigned...to death that is always—imminent and immanent.” This is an attempt to make sense of these circumstances and those choices of living while in the position of “the unthought.” The circumstances are nonsensical in the sense that they are unnaturally and purposefully constructed, and those lives and quotidian choices and living and survival and dying strategies are not erected here for critique, yet context, veneration and indictment of the failures of law and the structural violence it creates, maintains and requires as judicial and American precedent. Yet, this project is not an attempt at memorializing; instead, it is a witnessing, a testimony, a recollecting and a record-setting. This is my attempt at care; at care for the dead, the dying and those yet living in an impossible world, inclusive of myself, and the children and the lynchings that come next.

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Tulane Journal of Law & Sexuality, 2021

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an a... more If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a toolong memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery-skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.-Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother 2 We are running out of ways to request other ways to die. We are running out of ways to say stop killing us. We are running out of ways to request, demand, and demonstrate for drinkable water and livable homes. We are running out of ways to make separate but (un)equal a thing of the past. We are running out of ways to protect our children from bullets. We are running out of ways to birth children, safely. We are running out of ways to survive in food deserts. We are running out of ways to evade and avoid police contact, never mind search, seizure, and terror. We are running out of ways to make fortresses of moldy, hurricane-struck, and dilapidated homes. We are running out of ways to make ways out of no ways. We are running out of ways to make Black lives more than mere matter, or excess collateral. We are running out of ways to live in the wake of an always, already looming death. "Amerikkka" 3 is running out of time,

Diversity for Legal Thought & Practice, 2020

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, in partnership with the Center for Racial and ... more The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, in partnership with the Center for Racial and Economic Justice, is pleased to announce the inaugural "Diversity in Legal Thought and Practice" speaker series event for the 2020-2021 academic year. Adjunct Professor and Center for Racial and Economic Justice Affiliated Scholar T. Anansi Wilson will present two of their papers, "Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being" and "The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life" on Friday, October 16, at Noon.

Race and The Law Prof Blog Symposium: "Wakandan Jurisprudence: How Black Panther Challenges Us to Examine the Past, Present, and Future of Race.”, 2018

There is much to be said about Black Panther, much to be said about a movie that has caused many ... more There is much to be said about Black Panther, much to be said about a movie that has caused many to sit and drift, both anxiously and unwittingly, into the planning, enactment and re-imaging of Black Utopia and Black Reconciliation. There is something to be said for sitting and drifting. Both are often understood as passive acts, or non-acts, but in all truth require a type of still movement only found in focus and discipline. To drift is to the relieve the mind and/or body of navigational responsibility, to duty and desire to remain; it is always, already a type of freedom making. Submissive flight. Sitting, the upright folding of one's body that relieves ankle and foot from the responsibilities of mobility and/or erection. A submission to gravity. A relief. A de/reactivation of specific muscles and joints. A re/balancing. N'Jadaka emerges as a complicated and familiar character, destabilizing the narrative of Black Utopia. He is familiar, and forbidden, in the way the way that violent protest is a reoccurring, forbidden and familiar option that visits Black people in Amerikkka in the still of black being and the quiet of black rest. N'Jadaka-Eric Killmonger-operates as a stand in for myriad understandings and markings of what Black rage is and isn't. He is the reminder and the promise of the uncontrollable nature of Black rage, what we might call Black Combustibility; the danger of black feeling, of black being, of black insistence on life and resistance. "Combustibility is a measure of how easily a substance bursts into flame, through fire or combustion. This is an important property to consider when a substance is used for construction or is being stored." Black Combustibility is often marked and pathologized as the site of uncivilized blackness or Black excess. It is sometimes mis/understood as the inability of black people to control ourselves and imagined in tropes or hyper sexuality, hyper masculinity and excesses of strength and emotion. It finds its roots and routes in the transmutation of the Black being from subject to object in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. Brandings, scars and Bodily regulations. These markings of Black Combustibility work together to create a narrative that marks the most expressive, authentic and 1 1.7K shares at time of posting (10.22.20)

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

They examine the semiotic relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and the law. While Furtive Blackness is primarily concerned with regimes of policing—both by badged officers and deputized citizens—Strict Scrutiny examines how the reconstruction amendments have been deployed and redeployed to strictly scrutinize Black presence and appeals to justice and make them unintelligible, irrelevant claims without justiciable and therefore outside of law the concern of law. Strict Scrutiny is a riff on the phrase of judicial review that is primarily concerned with the Court’s inversion of the term to tightly regulate and foreclose Black access to legal redress, as well as the police practice of strictly scrutinizing Black presence and movement in public and private places. In essence, the ascription of furtivity makes way for strict scrutinization; while the Black interior strategy of furtivity and refusal creates a survival praxis that allows for a reprieve in the wake of these indignities.

These articles are an interpretation of the law as a tool of anti-blackness and an exposition of Black thought and deed in response to anti Blackness, both in black letter law and day to day life. Both articles are descriptive, interdisciplinary and rooted in traditional law and accented by Black queer and feminist theory, critical race studies, performance studies and literary analysis.

Specifically, Furtive Blackness engages the Fugitive Slave Law, Black (and Slave) Codes, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments jurisprudence and current cases of racialized and gendered policing to develop an analytic to Fourth Amendment law, criminal procedure, and policing as practiced by officers of the law and deputized white citizens. This analytic seeks to shed light on how Black and BlaQueer (LGBTQ) people—and bodies—have come to exist both in and outside of law; reachable through its policing arm, yet unreachable by many of its fundamental protections. In other words, this work seeks to articulate a framework that maps how American jurisprudence renders Black and BlaQueer people furtive—what I am titling “Furtive Blackness”—and how this furtivity exists as an afterlife of slavery and operates as a social and legal pretext for police encounters.

Furtive Blackness is primarily interested in how Black culture, flesh and movement come to operate—well outside the auspices of the Fourth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment—as bodies of evidence for probable cause, reasonable suspicion and the logics for the deployment of quotidian searches, excessive force and mass incarceration; Strict Scrutiny is primarily concerned with how Black presence appeals to justice are turned aside and viewed skeptically as always, already faulty and often, outside of justiciability. As such, I’m also interested in how this experience with being rendered furtive simultaneously marks Black citizens as outside of the protection of law, yet easily and routinely within its disciplinary reach.

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black ... more Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. These articles are about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black in black letter law.
They examine the semiotic relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and the law. While Furtive Blackness is primarily concerned with regimes of policing—both by badged officers and deputized citizens—Strict Scrutiny examines how the reconstruction amendments have been deployed and redeployed to strictly scrutinize Black presence and appeals to justice and make them unintelligible, irrelevant claims without justiciable and therefore outside of law the concern of law. Strict Scrutiny is a riff on the phrase of judicial review that is primarily concerned with the Court’s inversion of the term to tightly regulate and foreclose Black access to legal redress, as well as the police practice of strictly scrutinizing Black presence and movement in public and private places. In essence, the ascription of furtivity makes way for strict scrutinization; while the Black interior strategy of furtivity and refusal creates a survival praxis that allows for a reprieve in the wake of these indignities.
These articles are an interpretation of the law as a tool of anti-blackness and an exposition of Black thought and deed in response to anti Blackness, both in black letter law and day to day life. Both articles are descriptive, interdisciplinary and rooted in traditional law and accented by Black queer and feminist theory, critical race studies, performance studies and literary analysis.
Specifically, Furtive Blackness engages the Fugitive Slave Law, Black (and Slave) Codes, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments jurisprudence and current cases of racialized and gendered policing to develop an analytic to Fourth Amendment law, criminal procedure, and policing as practiced by officers of the law and deputized white citizens. This analytic seeks to shed light on how Black and BlaQueer (LGBTQ) people—and bodies—have come to exist both in and outside of law; reachable through its policing arm, yet unreachable by many of its fundamental protections. In other words, this work seeks to articulate a framework that maps how American jurisprudence renders Black and BlaQueer people furtive—what I am titling “Furtive Blackness”—and how this furtivity exists as an afterlife of slavery and operates as a social and legal pretext for police encounters.
Furtive Blackness is primarily interested in how Black culture, flesh and movement come to operate—well outside the auspices of the Fourth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment—as bodies of evidence for probable cause, reasonable suspicion and the logics for the deployment of quotidian searches, excessive force and mass incarceration; Strict Scrutiny is primarily concerned with how Black presence appeals to justice are turned aside and viewed skeptically as always, already faulty and often, outside of justiciability. As such, I’m also interested in how this experience with being rendered furtive simultaneously marks Black citizens as outside of the protection of law, yet easily and routinely within its disciplinary reach.

Critical Black Studies Reader, 2017

This paper explores the ways in which HIV criminalization laws act as continuations of racial-sex... more This paper explores the ways in which HIV criminalization laws act as continuations of racial-sexual terror exacted on the bodies of Black men who have sex with men. Through the lens of Critical Race Theory, this paper draws upon historical, cultural, political and legal examples to trace the road toward HIV criminalization and its rooting in fundamental anti-blackness, white supremacy and mechanisms of violent sexual comportment.

Social Science Research Network, 2021

Social Science Research Network, May 1, 2021

Social Science Research Network, Oct 8, 2020

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Social Science Research Network, May 1, 2021

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice, 2022

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Tulane Journal of Law & Sexuality, 2021

Diversity for Legal Thought & Practice, 2020

Race and The Law Prof Blog Symposium: "Wakandan Jurisprudence: How Black Panther Challenges Us to Examine the Past, Present, and Future of Race.”, 2018

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Critical Black Studies Reader, 2017