Unweighed Lives

This talk examines the political temporality of scale in dominant US media and popular discourse — specifically, the persistent use of the term ‘increasingly’ as a scalar alibi for fascism’s long-standing grip on Black life. Phrases like ‘increasingly authoritarian’, ‘worsening racism’, or ‘sliding into fascism’ depend on a vantage point that begins not with the plantation or the occupied zone, but with the belated disturbance of those previously unaffected.

Such scalar framings enact a violent epistemology: they obscure the fact that what is presented as a crisis-in-the-making is, for the colonized, regular police order. The future tense of warning (what might happen) becomes a liberal mechanism for ignoring the present tense of violation (what has always been). This deferral helps structure Black life as disposable — unseen at one scale, spectacularized at another, but never granted ontological weight across any.

Focusing on three sites — the totalitarian logic of plantation rule in slaveholding Massachusetts, the anti-woke movement’s restriction of oppositional Black speech across institutions, and the ongoing occupation of Black neighbourhoods by police — the talk argues that fascism is not emergent but foundational. What is new is not its presence, but its spillover into the European sector — i.e., into mainstream society.

By centring the view from Black life in the colonized sector — not as the uncounted, the aberrant, or the apocalyptic future, but as the basis of the settler-colonial order — Yannick G. Marshall asks what becomes possible when we discard the scalar vocabulary of liberal crisis and begin to measure political reality by what has never been measured.

Yannick Giovanni Marshall, PhD is a faculty member at California Institute of Arts, USA in self-imposed exile. A writer and scholar of African and Africana Studies he holds an MA in African American Studies and a PhD from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Columbia University. Marshall has published two collections of poetry, regularly contributes editorials and articles to Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Current Affairs, and has given numerous talks and interviews on race, colonialism, radical dissent, and policing. His forthcoming book The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon will be out with Zed-Bloomsbury Press in 2025. His writing and courses can be found at yannickgiovannimarshall.net.