“The historical formation of surveillance is not outside of the historical formation of slavery.”
- Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness" by Simone Browne
I need someone else to read this book so we can take about it cause it’s blowing my mind and also creeping me out a little bit.
In it Simone talks about how surveillance technologies and practices are racialized, and claims the Black body as a key site of specific conditions that include being monitored and controlled most especially in a Western context. She cites historic examples and offers creating and #creativity as modes of resistance. She talks about everything from branding during times of slavery to the prison industrial complex to facial recognition software to being patted down by TSA. It’s detailed, dense and extremely well written!!