Laundering of Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits

Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits is a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State that examines how Black Rage--conceived as a constructive and logical response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings racialized as Black--is cleaned for the unyielding means of White capital. Interlacing political theory with international histories of Black rebellion, it presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that consistently convert Black Rage into a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Laundering Black Rage investigates how the Rage directed at the police murder of George Floyd could be marshalled to funnel the Black Lives Matter movement into corporate advertising and questionable leadership, while increasing the police budgets inside the laundry cities of capital - largely with our consent.

Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering.

Intertwining stories of Black resistance throughout the African diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the laundering process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and organizers enraged at capitalism and White supremacy laundering their work for nefarious means.

Too Black is a low wage worker, poet, organizer and filmmaker. As a worker, he has toiled at wage theft factories such as Pizza Hut and Amazon. As a poet, Too Black has headlined the historic Nuyorican Poets Café, Princeton University, and Johannesburg Theater in South Africa. His words have appeared in publications such as Black Agenda Report, Left Voice, Indianapolis Recorder, and Hood Communist. He is the host and producer of The Black Myths Podcast, a podcast debunking the BS said about Black people, and is an organizer for the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2-a committee dedicated to the freedom of Indiana political prisoners John ＂Balagoon＂ Cole and Christopher ＂Naeem＂ Trotter. He is also the co-director of the documentary film The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up.

Rasul A. Mowatt - is just a son of Chicago and a subject of empire, while dwelling within notions of statelessness, settler colonial mentality, and anti-capitalism. Rasul also functions in the State as a Department Head in the College of Natural Resources, as an Interim Department Head in the Division of Academic and Student Affairs, and as an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Formally, Rasul was a Professor in the Departments of American Studies and Geography in the College of Arts + Sciences at Indiana University. Published work has been on analyzing lynching as racially violent forms of leisure in the American Behavioral Scientist, the dangers in viewing images of Black death in Biography, the threat of violence from intimate terrorism, White Nationalists, and the State in a special call for COVID-19 in Leisure in the Time of Coronavirus: A Rapid Response, and most recently, the pedagogies of empire through tourism in the Annals of Tourism Research. Rasul’s previous book, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The City and State Between Us, was published by Routledge in 2021.