Introduction:BiologizingCulture/CulturingBiology 35
This sets the stage also for reassessment of the structural as well as
structuring presence of the biological endowment of human beings.
Projects seeking to "assert the black body's agency in contexts where it
has been powerless" (Knowles 138) are turning to legal issues, formal
and informal racisms. The latter can be exemplified by pointing to the
difficulty even well-to-do African Americans have in hailing cabs in
New York City or by the fact that African American males are more
likely to be apprehended without cause by the police, the (in)famous
stop-and-friskpractice(James17).
Anotherandincreasinglyimportantareainwhichtheinterrelationof
race and biology is calling for new inquiry is environmental justice.
Environmental impact is inflicted disproportionately on racialized
bodies. Such biointersectional conditions manifest themselves in the
form of environmental hazards coming from industrial production but
also from "acts of nature." As Henry A. Giroux, in his reading of the
aftermathofhurricaneKatrina,hasshown,
the decaying black bodies floating in the waters of the Gulf Coast
represented a return of race against the media and public insistence that
this disaster was more about class than race.... The bodies of the
Katrina victims laid bare the racial and class fault lines that mark an
increasingly damaged and withering democracy and revealed the
emergenceofanewkindofpolitics,oneinwhichentirepopulationsare
now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and
consignedtofendforthemselves.(174)Asthisexampleshows,theblackbodyisnotonly,asdeconstructive
and Foucauldian cultural theory would have it, a "text upon which
histories of racial differentiation, exclusion, and violence are inscribed"
(Ferguson 192; Holloway 157-159). Instead, it possesses an agency —
andavictimhood—ofitsown.Itmakesvisibleandeveninsistsonwhat
the public sphere of mainstream U.S. culture would prefer to ignore,^27
namely "race" as a social and cultural form in which corporealities are
materially as well as physically lived and experienced. The idea of the
(^27) Holtinsiststhatthefashionable"discourseofsocialconstructedness[ofrace]
hasanairofunrealityaboutit"(10).