by Kyla Schuller
Biopolitics
In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets to protest the police forces and private citizens who kill Black people yet receive no penalty of any kind. The movement directly names and confronts a signature aspect of the United States government: that it treats Black people as disposable bodies valuable only for the labor which may be extracted from them and who thus can be killed with impunity by its agents. The movement fights back by valuing Black lives and holding police forces and private citizens accountable for murder. By emphasizing lives over bodies, Black Lives Matter’s name exposes these assumptions, which have been baked for centuries into the history of the United States.
Woman
In 1995, home in Northern California during my first year of college, I sat on my parents’ sofa flipping through one of the house’s most treasured possessions: a set of red-and-gold 1984 World Book encyclopedias. I was in the middle of the W volume when an entry labeled “Woman” gave me pause. “A woman can have many roles in society,” the entry opened, “including doctor, secretary, or homemaker.” Several pages followed, illustrated with black-and-white stock photographs of women performing various occupations. Sensing something was amiss, I returned to the shelf and pulled the M volume. Under the header “Man,” only three short words appeared: “See ‘Human Being.’”