No Tea

and the Chicago police, Blair highlights how issues of race, gender, class,
and sexuality quickly dominated all forms of communication on the web
page and became a hostile arena that shaped social relations and divided
neighborhood residents.
Continuing the focus on black queer geographies and the po liti cal economic
effects of gentrification is Kwame Holmes’s “Beyond the Flames:
Queering the History of the 1968 D.C. Riot.” Traditionally, historians
locate the origins of black communal vio lence within housing shortages,
systemic unemployment, and police brutality endemic to the post– World
War II American ghetto. Here though, Holmes asserts that the sexual
valences of ghettoization contributed to black urbanites’ willingness to eschew
the rational course of liberal reform in favor of the riotous release offered
by the destruction of private property. Focusing on the Shaw area of
Washington, D.C., Holmes engages the metropolitan police department’s
sexual regulation of black commercial areas, the sexual anx i eties spawned
by overcrowding in slum housing, and the symbolic work queer black residents,
across the sexuality spectrum performed to mark the neighborhood
as in decline.
The carceral state affects both black queers as much as the heterosexual
black community. In “The Strangeness of Pro gress and the Uncertainty of
Blackness,” Treva Ellison analyzes the 1994 Violent Crime Control and
Law Enforcement Act, the largest federal policing bill in U.S. history, to
understand how the discursive production of black nonnormativity and
gender nonconformity fits into the production of blackness as existing
outside juridical and ethical universality. The author argues that under
neoliberal multiculturalism, antiblack racism is reproduced via inclusive
reforms based on gender and sexuality. The impossibility of legal redress
for black injury opens up the possibility for the production of repre senta
tional spaces of convergence to talk about how multiple experiences of
harm and vio lence cohere around the production of places of absence of
ethical concern. Because blackness is at once overseen and unknown to the
law, a contradiction that conditions spatial differentiation, Ellison considers
what a politics of scale can do for multiple expressions of blackness in
the current moment.
Audre Lorde is a much- revered figure within black queer studies. Her
theorization of the erotic is often used to articulate a mode of solidarity in
which people from disparate backgrounds can come together to combat
oppression. In “Re- membering Audre: Adding Lesbian Feminist Mother
Poet to Black,” however, Amber Jamilla Musser refocuses our attention
Introduction • 21