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Two words that ruin your day: necro-politics. Stick around, because I’m about to prove to you that the United States don’t just manage life, they weaponize death. Peep game, first you got the scholars. In the 1970s, Michel Foucault introduced biopower, the state system for tracking, regulating, and optimizing population health, and if that sounds abstract, think census data, vaccine mandates, life expectancy charts, insurance actuarial tables, all that. Then in 2003, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe dropped the bomb. Mbembe said Foucault didn’t go far enough, that true power isn’t just about making life live, it’s about deciding who dies, and he called it necropolitics. This is one of the reasons why I fell in love with college policy debate, because it introduced me to new terms, new frameworks, whole new grammars for naming what my community had been living through without the vocabulary to indict it.

Just sprinkling some context of where we see biopower in America, we see it everywhere, we see it in the CDC tracking outbreaks, we see it in the FDA regulating food, we see it in insurance companies calculating the risk score of your life. Ahh, but here’s the catch, it’s a finesse. Biopower pretends to care about everybody, it’s sterile, it’s neutral, it’s scientific, except it’s not, because biopower collects data on everybody but it only protects some. The data on Black maternal mortality definitely illustrates what I’m talking about, because Black women have been dying at alarming rates for decades and nobody was listening. The spreadsheets saw them. The state just decided the numbers wasn’t worth acting on. That’s the two roles frame right there, what the system says it does versus what the system structurally does, and once you see that gap you can’t unsee it.

Now let’s bring back this other concept of necropolitics, because you do gotta figure some context in there. Mbembe says the state creates death worlds, social and physical spaces where survival ain’t guaranteed, not by accident but by design. They call it a trap because it’s a trap. Most of these tragedies and misfortunes in the system is not a glitch or an error but an actual part of the design. Take Flint, Michigan, the water was poison, officials knew, they did nothing, and that’s not negligence, that’s necropower. Take the southern border, migrants left in 110 degrees with no water, and that’s not oversight, that’s attrition. On my mama, I know it when I see it, because you cannot piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining while you’re also trying to claim to be the advocate for all of humanity over the globe while simultaneously being the leader in dehumanizing. Y’all never thought it was crazy that the land of the free has the biggest prison population in the world? Mass incarceration, prisoners denied basic health care while COVID ripped through cells, that’s not budget cuts, that’s a death sentence with a management plan attached.

See, Mbembe was building on Foucault’s concept of state racism and insisting that it ain’t colorblind, that these death worlds are racialized. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it bluntly in Golden Gulag: racism is the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Let that sink in. Premature death, by design. Who gets to grow old in America and who doesn’t is not a lottery, it’s a ledger. Apply Hartman here too, because when Saidiya Hartman describes the afterlife of slavery, she names skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, and premature death as the inheritance, which means Gilmore and Hartman are describing the same machine from two different rooms of the same house. This means anybody telling you these outcomes are just culture, just choices, just bad luck, is wrong, and their claimed neutrality is itself a position, because the view from nowhere is always a view from somewhere, usually somewhere with clean water.

Receipts from the Archive: Critical Historical Context

Crazy how none of this is new, because the plantation was America’s first death world and Mbembe says as much, naming the plantation and the colony as the original laboratories where sovereignty meant the power to expose whole populations to death while calling it order. Follow the receipts forward. After emancipation, convict leasing rebuilt the plantation inside the legal system, and in the Alabama mines and Mississippi levee camps the death rates ran so high that historians like Douglas Blackmon called it slavery by another name, because leased convicts was cheaper to replace than to keep alive. Then the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 hit, and Black men in Greenville was held at gunpoint on the levees doing forced labor while relief supplies got routed to white families first, which means the American disaster playbook, protect capital, abandon Black life, call it an act of God, was already written before FEMA was even a thought.

Keep going. From 1932 to 1972 the United States Public Health Service ran the Tuskegee syphilis study, watching Black men die of a treatable disease for forty years just to document the autopsy, which is biopower’s data obsession fused with necropower’s death sentence in one federal program. Through the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and starved them of investment, and those same 1930s maps predict today’s asthma rates, heat islands, food deserts, and life expectancy gaps down to the block. Like clockwork, in 1968 Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker was crushed to death in a garbage compactor the city refused to repair, and the strike that followed, the one Dr. King was assassinated supporting, was at its core a fight over whose bodies could be treated as disposable waste alongside the waste they hauled. Every era got its own paperwork, but the ledger stays the same. The evidence don’t support the fairy tale of progress interrupted by occasional tragedy. The evidence supports design.

The Land Remembers: Environmental Justice as Necropolitics

In 1982 the state of North Carolina decided to dump six thousand truckloads of PCB contaminated soil in Warren County, a county that was poor, rural, and majority Black, and when residents laid their bodies in front of the dump trucks and over five hundred people caught arrests, the modern environmental justice movement was born, feel me, fighting toxic waste is Black history. Around that same time, sociologist Robert Bullard was down here in Houston mapping where the city put its garbage, and he found that from the 1920s into the late 1970s, the overwhelming majority of Houston’s landfills and incinerators sat in Black neighborhoods even though Black folks was only about a quarter of the population, receipts he brought into Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management in 1979, the first lawsuit in this country to charge environmental discrimination under civil rights law. Then his book Dumping in Dixie proved the pattern was national, that race, not income, not property values, race, was the strongest predictor of where hazardous waste landed. Stretch the lens to Louisiana, where the eighty five miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans got so crowded with petrochemical plants that residents named it Cancer Alley, and peep the historical finesse, because many of those plants sit on top of former plantations, which means the same land that worked Black bodies to death in the nineteenth century is breathing cancer risk into Black lungs in the twenty first, Hartman’s afterlife of slavery written in air quality permits. Flint’s poisoned pipes, the Lower Ninth Ward left to rot after Katrina while wealthy neighborhoods was rebuilt, lead paint in the babies, refineries flaring next to the elementary school, all of it is Gilmore’s premature death mapped onto geography, all of it is Mbembe’s death worlds with a zip code. Two things can be true, America can pass environmental laws and America can decide, over and over, whose environment those laws actually protect, and having the luxury to never wonder what’s in your tap water is itself a sign of which side of the death world you live on.

Pedagogy of the Buried: What Death Worlds Do to the Schoolhouse

For the folks in the back who think this is just a public health conversation, let me bring it to education, because the schoolhouse is where necropolitics gets laundered into common sense. Start with the material. The same redlined neighborhoods that got the landfills got the underfunded schools, because property tax funding formulas guarantee that the children of death worlds inherit crumbling buildings, and in cities like Flint, Newark, and Baltimore, the lead wasn’t just in the neighborhood pipes, it was in the school water fountains, meaning children was being neurologically injured at the exact site that was supposed to elevate them. Then look at school closures, like Chicago shutting down roughly fifty schools in 2013, almost all of them in Black and Brown neighborhoods, hollowing out community anchors and calling it fiscal responsibility. Add the school to prison pipeline, where zero tolerance policies convert classroom behavior into criminal records and feed the same mass incarceration system where COVID ripped through cells, and you see that the pipeline is a conveyor belt between one death world and another.

Just as deadly is what happens to memory. Apply Trouillot here, because Silencing the Past teaches us that power operates in the making of archives and the telling of history, deciding which stories get sources, which get silence. When legislatures pass memory laws like Oklahoma’s HB 1775 that make teachers scared to teach Tulsa, Warren County, or redlining honestly, they are running necropolitics on the curriculum itself, killing the knowledge that would let young people name what’s killing them. Freire told us the oppressed must learn to name the world in order to change it, and Du Bois was doing this exact work back in 1899 when The Philadelphia Negro documented premature Black death block by block while the academy shrugged. This means the implication for educators is not optional, because an education system that teaches children inside death worlds without ever naming the death worlds is not neutral, it is a partner in the design. Teaching the vocabulary, biopower, necropolitics, premature death, environmental racism, is life saving pedagogy, and consciousness precedes transformation, always has.

An Intersectional Autopsy: Who the Death Worlds Land On First

Lastly, before anybody flattens this into one story, let’s run the intersectional analysis, because death worlds don’t land on everybody in the community the same way, and Crenshaw taught us that when systems of power intersect, the folks standing at the intersection catch traffic from every direction. Black women carry the sharpest edge of the maternal mortality crisis, dying from pregnancy related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women regardless of income or education, and when Serena Williams, with all her money and fame, nearly died because clinicians dismissed her own report of her own body, that’s Moya Bailey’s misogynoir operating inside biopower’s supposedly neutral hospital charts. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free it would mean everyone else would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires the destruction of every interlocking system, and the environmental data proves them prophets, since it is disproportionately poor Black women in Cancer Alley burying husbands, organizing against petrochemical permits, and breathing the flare stacks while pregnant.

Keep the lens moving. Disabled Black folks catch necropolitics from the medical system and the police at the same time, from care rationing frameworks that quietly score some lives as less worth saving to wellness checks that end in gunfire. Incarcerated women, disproportionately Black and poor, was shackled during childbirth in this country within living memory, and Angela Davis reminds us the prison itself is a gendered death world, not just a men’s story. Class cuts through all of it, because the Black professional in the suburbs and the Black grandmother next to the refinery are both inside Hartman’s afterlife, but they are not breathing the same air, and pretending otherwise is how liberal representation politics sells symbolic wins while the material outcomes for poor Black women stay flatlined. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. Centering the folks catching it worst is not a rhetorical courtesy, it is the only methodology that shows you the whole machine.

So This Is What We Do

I made this video and wrote this essay because I think it’s important to put language around the phenomenons we experience so we can have power over them, so I hope this gives you a little bit of clarity and a little bit of jargon to throw at this world that we experiencing. Right now we’re watching a hybrid regime, biopower tracks your steps, your sleep, your location, managing your life, but necropolitics decides that if you’re poor, Black, Indigenous, or undocumented, your life is worthless. Look at the opioid crisis, white communities got treatment centers and rehabilitation while our community got criminalization and pathology for crack, both of these are dealing with addiction but you see two different ways of managing it. Biopower, like I learned in college, simply means to make live and let die, while necropower means to let live and make die. Think about that.

See, Mbembe reminds us that sovereignty in this country has always included the power to build death worlds and call them policy, and Gilmore teaches us that racism is precisely the production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, which means naming is the first act of resistance. So this is what we do. First, we name it, we call it necropolitics, we call out the violence hiding behind policy jargon. Second, we demand accountability. Understanding who is expendable in this country, who’s deemed always already exposable and disposable, is what you need to understand this country.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Biopower is the state’s management of life through data, regulation, and public health, but it’s a finesse, because it collects data on everybody while only protecting some, and Black maternal mortality is the receipt.

2. Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe’s 2003 intervention, names the deeper power, the sovereign right to decide who dies, and it builds death worlds, spaces where survival ain’t guaranteed by design, from Flint to the southern border to the prison cell.

3. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism, the state sanctioned production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, connects to Saidiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery, and together they prove premature Black death is a policy outcome, not a coincidence.

4. Environmental justice is necropolitics made visible on the map, from Warren County in 1982 to Robert Bullard’s Houston landfill receipts to Cancer Alley plants sitting on former plantations, race remains the strongest predictor of who breathes poison.

5. Naming is power, which is why memory laws and curriculum censorship are part of the death world design, and why teaching this vocabulary, in classrooms and on timelines, is life saving pedagogy. Consciousness precedes transformation.

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Related Readings: An Annotated Bibliography

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), expanded as Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019). The foundational text, where Mbembe extends Foucault to argue that sovereignty is the power to dictate who may live and who must die, introducing the concept of death worlds.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 to 1976 (Picador, 2003) and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976). Where biopower and state racism get theorized, the make live and let die formula that Mbembe flips on its head.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007). Source of the definition of racism as state sanctioned production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, grounded in the political economy of prison expansion.

Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Westview, 1990) and Invisible Houston (Texas A&M University Press, 1987). The father of environmental justice documents how race predicts the placement of hazardous waste, starting with his Houston landfill research behind Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Names the afterlife of slavery, skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, the throughline this essay leans on.

Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans (Doubleday, 2006). The definitive receipts on Tuskegee and centuries of medical necropolitics dressed up as science.

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, 2008). Documents convict leasing as a death world rebuilt inside the law after emancipation.

Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (NYU Press, 2014). The scholarly deep dive on how zoning, housing markets, and siting decisions manufacture environmental sacrifice zones.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991). The intersectionality framework this essay’s autopsy section runs on.

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). Black feminist blueprint proving that freeing those at the bottom of interlocking systems frees everybody.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021). Names the specific antiblack misogyny that shapes how institutions, including hospitals, read Black women’s bodies.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Connects mass incarceration to the plantation lineage and gender, essential for the prison as death world argument.

Trouillot, Michel Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon, 1995). Explains how archives and curricula silence the very histories memory laws now criminalize.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Naming the world as the precondition for changing it, the pedagogical spine of this whole platform.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro (1899). The original data driven study of premature Black death by neighborhood, proof this analysis is over a century old.

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