State Violence Is Chronic

State Violence Is Chronic Cynthia Wu (bio) In July 2016, I wrote an essay geared for a general readership on the significance of Black Lives Matter for nonblack people of color.1 I started composing it two days after Jeronimo Yanez, a police officer in the Falcon Heights suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, shot and killed Philando Castile after pulling him over during a traffic stop. The story had hit home for me because I lived in a neighborhood only a few miles away from where the incident took place. At first, Castile's partner—who had recorded the harrowing scene on her cell phone—had identified the cop involved as "Chinese." In the intervening days before it was revealed that Yanez was, in fact, Latinx, Asian Americans worried that this tragedy would reprise the events that followed Peter Liang's shooting of Akai Gurley. Castile's death came on the immediate heels of Alton Sterling's in Louisiana under similar circumstances, and at this moment, the nation plunged into a state of intense mourning for the black lives prematurely cut short. In my essay, I wondered whether there might there be resonances between the state violence experienced by African Americans and other U.S. blacks with the type that Southeast Asian Americans face. The Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis are one of the few places where men of Asian descent are criminalized. The U.S. war in Vietnam had created a refugee crisis, and the Twin Cities became one of the largest resettlement sites in the aftermath of imperial conflict. At the same time, I thought it was important to cast light on instances when Southeast Asian Americans, who tend to be tracked into roles that carry out the dirty work of the state, are complicit in these very atrocities. The first two online venues I approached declined to publish the essay. One editor responded by expressing her reservation that "after a lot of violent events where black people are victimized, there are a lot of [End Page 295] posts that go up in the API sphere about how 'it happens to us' [which] ... might distract from the center of this incident, which should be the death of Castile."2 The editor's point was well taken. Blackness in the United States has historically occupied a locus of criminality against which all others are made legible. Therefore, it is imperative that nonblacks of every racial category hold space, particularly in times of heightened attention to black death, for this mourning. State violence is chronic. The truth is there is never a time when black lives are not being snuffed out—no time that is not a time like this. For more than a year, I have had an app on my smartphone called "Archives + Absences." Created by digital artist Josh Begley, the app sends its users a push notification every time a police officer is responsible for a death in the United States. The developers for "Archives + Absences" receive their information by scouring a wide swath of news sources. When the app's user taps on the icon, a screen appears showing two functions: one is a scrolling list of names of the departed arranged by date, the most recent first, and the other is an interactive satellite map with a flag marking each death's location. With the exception of the more remote parts of northern Alaska, the entire United States is awash in flags. The push notifications from "Archives + Absences" come with alarming frequency. As a user of the app, I grow unsettlingly accustomed to the beeps from my smartphone. In fact, one alert arrived shortly before I wrote these words. As my time allows, I search the Internet for the names and read the reports about these cases. There are so many that never garner the amount of outrage as a Castile (or a Terrence Crutcher or a Keith Lamont Scott, the two names that, as of this writing, are making the news). A broader and unceasing array of fatalities barely register, the departed mourned only by family and other loved ones. If Asian American studies wishes to mount critiques of state atrocities against

Criminology · Genealogy · Political science · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · Tragedy (event · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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