TRUMP

248 ANATOMY OF A MONSTROSITY
which Fanon and Martin alike were condemned—and
Fanon’s concept of comparaison [sic] sheds further light
on Zimmerman’s motivations as a liminally racialized
subject. I argue that it is precisely by questioning the circularity
of Hegel’s formulation—in which to stand one’s
ground is to claim what one already has access to—and
by diagnosing what lies beneath that ground that we can
avoid mistaking the legal symptom for the underlying ailment
and craft strategies for resisting white supremacy in
the present. 735
Could you make sense of it? I certainly couldn’t, and I’ve spent over
20 years in school and specialize in social and political theory. And
yet somehow numerous people on the left spend their time writing
like this, even as they try to discuss serious issues that require urgent
political attention. This kind of thinking doesn’t clarify, it obscures.
And yet moral clarity is the thing we need most of all in a world whose
atrocities are constantly concealed beneath euphemism.
“Alright,” you might well say, “but that’s academic writing. They’re
trying to write for other academics, not a general audience.” But
should anyone be spending their time writing like this? Should even
the tiniest fraction of the finite resource of human labor-hours be
expended upon producing paragraphs like the one above? If one cares
about the issue of young black men being killed, is there any sense
in which writing like this advances us on the issue, or gets us an inch
closer to having less of these killings happen? Do academics get an
all-purpose exemption from having to be useful, relevant, and intelligible?
Shouldn’t it be their job to help us understand what’s going on?
But it’s also a problem that plagues left language more broadly. For
example, instead of talking about suffering, cruelty, and deprivation,
the left now frequently talks about “marginalization” and “exclusion.”
These terms don’t really make the stakes clear; they sound like bad