How many time have you actually read the Terms of Service (TOS), or Privacy policies on websites, services and social media that you use? It’s so boring and tedious, right? What if there is a way to make it simple to decode and likely for you to check them out? What if it was interesting enough to make you WANT to check them out.
I had a dream once, a vision, I wanted to do something, so, I…
Libraries are a glimmer of hope in a situation where a rogue, corrupt element in government has done everything they can to destroy society’s institutions. The Library concept is like a buoy in the chaos of idiocy. Go to a Library.
We have seen some weird shit in the past 30 years in the U.S. In the most recent Presidential campaign, the candidate from the Party that is supposedly the working…
I’m working on a conference paper about Sonia Sotomayor, and especially her dissent in Utahv.Strieff (2016). One part of the paper uses Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to try to think through what Sotomayor is doing in the dissent. Here’s some of what I wrote today, in draft form:
Sotomayor’s dissent pushes further than its citational practices alone. This section argues that Sotomayor constructs, in Part IV of the dissent, a phenomenology of the bodily experience of being stopped and searched, which I explore through Sara Ahmed’s theorization of a “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’”(2006, 139) In doing so Sotomayor enables, at least for a few pages, the loftiness of a Court opinion to reach down and connect to lived experience. Dayan contends that law and its “rituals” creates new forms of legal personhood that often do not have connection to law as it is lived by those the law affects—by those whose personhood is put into question, disfigured, made ghostly, or seized in the operations of law. She focuses on the “law’s power to define” as “mak[ing] things on its own terms, terms that may or may not be accountable to experience” (216). This entails, for Dayan, “unearthing … the ‘dry bones’ of law and giving them life in unexpected places,” something that is possible only “outside the guild of lawyers” (xi). And yet, in her dissent in Strieff, Sotomayor performs this unearthing and enlivening from within not just the guild of lawyers, but from inside the Supreme Court itself—albeit, of course, in a decision in which she is in the minority. While Dayan’s overall argument is essential, we see in Strieff the occasional crack in the façade of deadened legal language through which law might illuminate life.
Sotomayor’s dissent works against the tendency of obscuring experience that Dayan identifies—a tendency that the majority in Strieff partakes in—by providing a detailed and I argue phenomenological analysis of what being stopped and searched entails. Notably, she opens Section IV with the disclaimer “Writing only for myself, and drawing on my own professional experiences…” (9-10). No longer joined by Ginsburg in the dissent, Sotomayor makes explicit the turn to personal experience, to the law as lived. She marks this dissent as something different, and marks herself as a living, experience person, even in her position as a Justice of the Supreme Court. What follows involves bringing to the Court a detailed account of being stopped that integrates a phenomenology of the stop and search with a command over Fourth Amendment precedent.
Part IV of the dissent commences, following Sotomayor’s avowal of drawing on her own professional experience, with her assertion that she “would add” to her dissent that “unlawful ‘stops’ have sever consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested by that name” (10). For her, the naming of the stop in an opinion does not capture its reality; conventional legal rhetorics are not enough to grapple the law as lived. Furthermore, while “many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more” (10). It is not that all experience being stopped in the same way, but rather that the experience of being stopped and searched is differentially distributed. Sotomayor writes that while Strieff is white, “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny” (12). Thus, we should not focus primarily on the lived experience of any random person living in the United States, or of a generic colorless (read: white) citizen. Rather, conceptualizing the stop-and-search encounter with police requires proceeding from the lives of the people of color disproportionately targeted by police.
In this sense, Sotomayor recognizes and makes legible in her dissent what Ahmed calls in her queer phenomenology a “political economy” of stopping (Ahmed 2006, 140). This political economy analyzes how “stopping…is distributed unevenly between others” and how the stop and search “is a technology of racism: “some bodies more than others are ‘stopped’ by being the subject of the policeman’s address” (139-40). The third chapter of her work examines the racialization of space, contrasting “the ease with which the white body extends itself in the world through how it is orientated” (a phenomenology of “the ‘I can’”) with a Frantz Fanon-inspired “phenomenology of the black body” that “could be described in terms of the bodily and social experience of restriction, uncertainty, and blockage” (a phenomenology of “the utterance ‘I cannot’”) (138-9). She delineates two different modalities of phenomenology:
…whiteness becomes a social and bodily orientation given that some bodies will be more at home in a world that is orientated around whiteness. … For bodies that are not easily extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? … A phenomenology of ‘being stopped’ might take us in a different direction than one that beings with [whiteness and] motility” (138-9).
I argue that in her dissent Sotomayor engages in this second mode of phenomenology, one that interrogates the legal mechanisms that authorize the stopping from the perspective of one who is stopped and details the impressions such stopping makes.
Only those bodies subject to constant stopping “realize how degrading a stop can be,” and their experience is most important for examining how “this Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine” as a result of Strieff—which itself is only the most recent case in a long trajectory of cases weakening Fourth Amendment protections. The language Sotomayor uses in her phenomenology is striking, especially given the venue. In the span of only the three pages of Part IV on their own, she describes the rampant stop and search practices as (10-12): “degrading”; an “indignity”; making the person being stopped “‘helpless’ (citing Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1); placing one under an “officer’s control”; effecting civil death (about which more in the next section); subjecting one to “humiliation” and a “violation” of one’s “dignity”; producing a “double consciousness”; and making one’s “body…subject to invasion.” All of this language suggests that those subject to being stopped at any time, for no particular reason, experience a loss of personhood and bodily integrity. Dayan analyzes the ways that “law encapsulates, sustains, and invigorates philosophies of personhood,” contending that American law has constructed a set of “negative personhood” statuses as a series of “legal disabilities,” many of which depersonalize and disfigure (in multiple sense of the word) people of color and/or those convicted of crimes (2011, xii). Sotomayor’s dissent, rather than further entrenching the seizing of personhood as much of the Court’s jurisprudence does, uses its positionality within the official legal discourse to unearth the way the Court has participated in the construction of negative personhood and legal disability. The effect of the Court’s decisions when it comes to the Fourth Amendment is to ensure that the bodies of people of color constantly experience a political economy of stopping and cannot extend into space, with the result of this being the robbing of their very personhood.
The (majority conservative) Supreme Court wants to cause a civil war, and they want to burn this country to the ground to rebuild anew. This is the goal, this is how they are going to do it, and we are witnessing in real time the fall to fascism.
So about 200 million people just had their 4th Amendment rights abolished, but they say nothing can be done about the 2nd Amendment?
