The Architecture of the Box, or: Slow Violence *is* Fast Violence
The air in waiting rooms always has that distinctive scent. To mix metaphors, waiting rooms are in the freshly sterile genre: Fabuloso, wax, ozone. I can hear the aches from those creaky plastic chairs, a gaudy mold made for the “average,” which is everyone ever (and no one in particular). That cold first touch before it steals body heat is a reminder; to be in a waiting room is to be uncomfortable. It's alienating.
Reinforcing that alienation is the desk, often adorned with a glass wall. At the desk sits a functionary, a bureaucrat. They—given that they steward whatever lower rung of whatever bureaucracy beckons someone into a waiting room—are forced to use technology that would be recognizable to someone whether they are in 1876 or 2026. The primary one is the form, with its supporting “platform”of the clipboard. A penstroke, and the boundary between the organic world of experience and the empirical world of institutions is dissolved.
With this move, whatever nebulous thing that is gestured at with the idea of “what it means to be a person” gets boiled down to data: Name. Date of Birth. Insurance Policy. One is a person if and only if they are made legible to the bureaucracy.
Then... there’s the Box.
Halfway down the page, it's a geometric little gourd, waiting for you to fill it. All of one's history, how one relates to their family, and which ancestors one most deeply identifies with. Oh, and it's a core social determinant of health, class, and is treated like a core feature of one's biological make up.
This Box asks about race: [ ] White. [ ] Black. [ ] Asian. [ ] Native.
After tracing the document, one realizes that they have to... fill it out. That's if they want access to whatever services are on the other side of reifying their position in the social hierarchy, at any rate.
These boxes, along with any others on the form, especially “sex” (though it might say gender if one's dealing with a more liberal bureaucracy) highlight ostensibly meaningful categories. I know that I have a lot of pride in being Black, for example. However, it should be clear that it's dangerous to relate to these Boxes uncritically. Things that are personally important being made (or already existing as) legible to the state or other bureaucracies is part and parcel of what enables the management of populations. Again, it's alienating; sorting people like they are boxes (ha) in a warehouse, so that they can be “managed” more easily.
Regardless, I'd like to go back to that other recognizable technology: the pen. Ink is a liquid, and—as far as I can tell—at least partially composed of water, which is critical to life. It’s also—for Black folks—the medium by which we were transported from our societies to build a “new” one for the white folks. That dark, heavy water of the Atlantic has a sort of resonance with ink; both, in their own ways, wrote (and write) into being reality as colonists might tell it.
Rather than this Box, this ink, this water being a mirror, reflecting all of the good that comes from having a history, it is a trapdoor. Filling that Box is to sign up to be sorted. It is to put the period at the end of a multi-century sentence of settler colonialism and slavery. A Process reduced to an Event. The architects, especially the early modern Portuguese and their partners across Europe, are long dead. Their ghosts, though? Still guiding events, still encouraging every sentence to end with their period and their ink.
These architects are ghosts, but at one point, they were flesh and blood. To find them, the waiting room of the present must be left behind; the past must be invoked. Through this temporal movement, fluorescent lights and cold tiles are replaced with beams of moon and sand-swept shores on Africa's Atlantic coast.
A critically important shore is in Rio de Oro, in the southern part of what is now Western Sahara. The year is 1441; a palindromic thing upon which the modern world pivots. A pair of (relatively) new ships, inspired by the qāribs that sailed the Mediterranean since the heydays of Al-Andalus, slosh around in the black. This innovation, the caravel, enabled economically-viable travel down the coast of Africa from Iberia. This allowed for “exploration” to become synonymous with “trade,” which was often inseparable from “extraction.” Said plainly, it's slavery from top to bottom.
One can imagine the captain of these ships, hailing from Portugal, planting himself on the sand. Spices, treaties, stars, or whatever else would be interesting to a veritable explorer are dwarfed by the possibility of furthering the (Spanish) Crown's interests and the personal gain that could follow.
So, a raid ensues, ending with the capture of some Amazigh, and a captive of theirs referred to as “[their] black slave woman.” This is the kind of scene that makes 1441 a pivot point. Whatever relationships she had to people and place were taken once by her Amazigh captives and again by becoming an entry in the Portuguese's logbook. Blackness, while be(com)ing a source of power, is—in these nonBlack minds—a void steeped in non-being.
Here, a wall of the architect's Box is drawn; the shot unheard worldwide, the first volley of a global-colonial war of terror. In this war, peoples become cargo, with ever-shifting and ever-pernicious rationales. If her name—her being begins and ends at “Black,” with a strained relationship to her marginalized gender experience, the looming idea of the Human is already defined by what it is not. Humans can't (or at least shouldn't) be kidnapped, so... anyone who is not human can be harvested, affirming that they aren't human, and potentially never were in the first place. It is a logic that justifies any course taken by the powerful.
Coming back to the present for a spell, such a connection to the past affects the clipboard's weight; the pressure of phantom hands guiding current events is more acute. That black ink that recalls black water also brings to mind the hulls of those ships. Those dark, acrid and airless spaces point to the seeming “illogic” of the whole enterprise. But, again; the whole point of the human is that it is defined negatively. It stands to reason that its incipient activities, like logic and reason, are similarly negative. How else can it be explained, without relying on odd conversations about fundamental essences, that maximizing the “yield” of this enterprise meant putting people in conditions that ensured the deaths of hundreds? The turning of them—of us—of my ancestors into the observable facets of embodiment—the flesh—led to these kinds of double-sided approaches to “rational” management. People became a stock that could be “endlessly” replenished. Thus, it was nothing more than a rounding error that a few Black “eggs” were broken for the colonial “omelettes” of blood-soaked domination and profit.
Gender becomes something alien or foreign to these fleshy masses. It's only left to the realm of unquestionable cisness, which is for human citizens, not fleshy-and-fungible non-beings. In that zone, one is not a parent, they are a birther or stock. If the ledgers tracked the fungibility of flesh, the ship etched that fungibility into that flesh.
After many Middle Passages, the back-facing temporal lens can move forward to Virginia in 1662. The Box that reifies and stores flesh is mutating again. Given that sexual assault that is part and parcel of patriarchal regimes, including this slave society, there had to be legislation in place for the offspring of white fathers. To avoid the ability to try and claim freedom through paternal lineage, the state passed anti-accumulation edicts that confer status based on the race of the mother.
This was a critical turning point in the justification for Black subjection, as it ensured that heritability was a critical part of its continuation. Reproduction's productive role was made explicit, while encouraging the reinforcement of the bounds between humans and non-beings.
Obviously, the Box doesn't have Black and White as its only choices. Those lay out the two ends of the racial hierarchy. There's a whole middle layer that maintains the pyramid.
As slavery was “ending” in the 19th century, the need for “undesirable” (i.e. forced) work didn't go away. Given that Black folks were recently able to find legal emancipation and end legal slavery, there was an organized resistance to doing that same work for low pay (though it should be said, many slaves did not work for free; especially towards the end of legal slavery). Given that slavery was occurring in tandem with other colonization efforts, it became feasible to start tapping those colonies for labor. In the West Indies, as elsewhere in the Americas and other colonies, this led to Chinese and South Asian labor working on those plantations, and doing that low-paid work. It should be self-evident to see how this might lead to... racial resentment, to put it lightly.
The point of this architecture is clear. Colonial admins needed to ensure that they could continue to enjoy their exploitative subjection regimes, even as Black folks used their social power to decompose the grip elites had on them. Introducing folks (racialized immigrants) into a context that encourages and nurtures antiBlackness—while always-already exporting antiBlackness outward—is a surefire way to prevent robust and widespread solidarities from forming. This shift, towards regimes of “bracketed” coerced/forced labor through things like debt and contracts opened up a path to humanity, which, to belabor the point, comes at the expense of Blackness.
This wall of the Box says “if you can't be white, you should try. Even if you don't succeed, at least you're not Black.” Calling this lateral violence rings true in some ways, but it can elide that while racialized people share enemies, we also have differences that need to be attended to. Being in the middle of a social system is a Faustian bargain par excellence. The shadows cast by propping up in that Box is the only promise that it can offer; situational respite and shade that works great until the Sun moves or it gets too hot. Is that really worth sacrificing folks, even if they are seen as “lesser than”?
That Box in the present is still waiting to be filled. The form points to five (plus!) centuries of sorting that can't be so easily disconnected from violence that exceeds capture by definition and articulation. The same script that dictates how that black ink travels also seeds what it frames as errors; whether it's a culturally relevant name that leads to unsteady work or constant self-explanations, or a death from shock since the doctor assumed superhuman pain tolerance.
When the Box doesn't fit the experience, it is more likely that one changes themselves, rather than the Box changing. Otherwise, the “non-compliant” risk constant judgement and harassment at the very least. These sites of violence made palpable highlight that Boxing itself is a kind of violence.
Thankfully, the Box isn't all there is; it couldn't be. If life were really only what was found in ledgers, it'd not last long. Africans were captured for many reasons, but core motivations revolved around various indigenous knowledges; without such a context, things like rice cultivation would not have been so possible and made so central to the Lowlands during the so-called Colonial period of the so-called US.
More clearly, there were many a rebellion and uprising, alongside full on maroon communities, where folks asserted their personhood. Refusal of the Box isn't about rejecting identity; it's about claiming the obligations and accountabilities that come with self-definition and determination.
I imagine this waiting room to be a hospital; that feels like the site that weaves together the discussed threads of history, legibility, life, living, and death. When they call for the form, that hesitation holds within it the smoldering historical embers of ancestors fighting against the same forces in a different form. The world of War of Terror needs to be ended. There is more struggle to be had. Maybe that Box needs to be empty; let the gourd hold nothing but air.
Of course, the functionary might say something like “You forgot to fill out a section.” Of course, their review is correct, at least from their point of view.
However, there's no need to explain oneself; all one needs to say is “I know.”
That refusal can make the room swell, like the walls are being blown away. Like there's a boundless energy ahead. Whatever nebulosity comes from rejecting the benefits of the Box should be deeply and seriously considered; something has to change if that architecture is going to be deconstructed. Even if it means embracing that nebulosity.
References
In lieu of direct citations, the following works were critical in engaging with this topic. Think of the ideas they present as ancestral allies against the ghostly architects.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Vol. 53. NYU Press, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n6ptnn.
Saunders, A. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Bois, William Edward Burghardt Du. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Russell & Russell, 1966.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 2020.
Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. With Internet Archive. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. http://archive.org/details/indenturedlaborc0000look.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
Virginia. mn, statutes Virginia (Colony) Laws, and William Waller Hening. The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. Published Pursuant to an Act of the General Assembly of Virginia, Passed on the Fifth Day of February One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight .. With University of Pittsburgh Library System. Richmond: Printed by and for Samuel Pleasants, junior, printer to the commonwealth, 1809. http://archive.org/details/statutesatlargeb02virg.
Morris, J. Brent. Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp. UNC Press Books, 2022.
