Destructive and productive entwinements of racialized law, politics, and American action cinema date back to the earliest days of motion pictures, beginning, most pronouncedly, perhaps, with The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 epic drama based on The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon Jr., an American White supremacist, politician, lawyer, Baptist minister, novelist, playwright and filmmaker. [xxxiv] As described by The New Yorker, The Birth of a Nation “shows Southern whites forming the Ku Klux Klan to defend themselves against such abominations” as interracial sex and marriage. [xxxv] “The movie asserts that the white-sheet-clad death squad served justice summarily and that, by denying blacks the right to vote and keeping them generally apart and subordinate, it restored order and civilization to the South.” [xxxvi] As Thomas Dixon Jr. expounds, The Birth of a Nation celebrates the courage of Clansmen who, “daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon’s death,” saved the “Aryan race” from “the bold attempt of Thaddeus Stevens to Africanize ten great States of the American Union.” In a show of solidarity, and as a favor to Thomas Dixon Jr., who was “an old college buddy,” President Woodrow Wilson agreed to host a screening of The Birth of a Nation in the East Room of the White House, where it was viewed by Wilson, his daughter Margaret and select guests. [xxxvii]

55 years later, on August 03, 1970, four days before the Marin County courthouse incident of August 07, and immediately prior to a meeting with “Law Enforcement Assistance Administration people” from California, New York, Illinois and Colorado, President Richard Nixon summoned the genre of the American action movie not only in support of his law and order agenda, but also as a purifying counterpoint to a corrosive free press. Speaking to news reporters in Denver, Colorado, Nixon begins with a dollars-and-cents account of his administration’s commitment to law enforcement: “In a time that we are cutting budgets, there is one area where we are drastically increasing budgets": Federal aid to state and city law enforcement. From 1969 to 1970, Nixon reports, his administration increased federal aid to state and city law enforcement agencies from $60 million to $280 million. By 1971, Nixon predicts, his administration will further increase that allocation to $450-500 million. But a seven-fold increase in federal funds to law enforcement agencies is alone not enough. [xxxviii]

To fully protect the American "system of law and order and justice . . . that is now under attack in so many areas," says Nixon, Congress must expand the District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act of 1970, authorizing, among other things, the Federal Government to "use its source of information and its officials throughout the country to assist local officials in a coordinated program," and the news media and free press must stop "glorify[ing] and . . . mak[ing] heroes out of those who engage in criminal activities.” Beyond enormous budgets, law and order necessitates a more coordinated system and a change in stories told. [xxxix] 

Doing a better job than the press, in Nixon's view, are Hollywood westerns. Most recently, Nixon shares, he has watched Chisum, starring John Wayne. The movie prompts him to wonder "why it is that the western [as a genre] survives year after year after year." Nixon concludes that in addition to "the excitement, the gun play, and the rest,” (emphasis mine) the western endures because "the good guys come out ahead in westerns; the bad guys lose." [xl] Such clarity, however, is an affordance of fantasy rather than reality. Judicial processes may determine guilt or innocence in a particular instance; but they do not produce absolute judgments of character. They do not produce “good guys” and “bad guys.” To the contrary, in most cases, judicial processes assume a human capacity for change, or rehabilitation. Similarly, journalism seeks to report on and document complex events as they transpire in time and place rather than to formulate enduring and recurring character types. Good guys and bad guys are conventions of fictional genres for the production of effects like eternal value, tension, dramatic action and perceptions/sensations of resolution.

On August 07, 1970, reporting on the takeover of a Marin County courtroom by Black revolutionaries, including George Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, Time magazine observed, “The . . . gunplay in San Rafael in a curious way pointed up the hazards of the President as film critic. In praising the new John Wayne film Chisum, he seems to have overlooked the fact that in it the good guys prevail over the bad guys only by taking the law into their own hands. That, of course, is what the ‘revolutionaries’ of Marin County were attempting . . . . Vigilantism appeals not only to conservatives.” [xli] In the real world that Nixon wishes was more like the White imaginaries of westerns he consumes in the evenings for entertainment, real people seek human dignity, and in pursuit of it may challenge White supremacy’s contended monopoly on violence.

It bears note that to categorize Chisum and Black revolutionaries alike as vigilantes is to erase the racialized assumptions and tropes by which White vigilantes are effectively deputized. In the “old West,” Nixon observes, “before New Mexico was a State [1912], there was a time when there was no law. But the law eventually came.” [xlii] The law, as Nixon describes it, is disembodied—genderless, colorless. But when it comes, it comes in bodies. It comes as Chisum, and Chisum comes, as John Wayne states, because “there was land . . . for the taking and keeping, if you were willing to fight . . . the Indians.” [xliii] The law comes in a White body drawn by the promise of property occupied, or haunted, by Red bodies. Because they are Indians/Reds, they are subhuman; they are animal-like; They roam the land, but do not own it. Through a brave confrontation with a homeless “Red” savagery, virtuous, principled, and paternalistic White males bring law and order, always already angelic emissaries of better ways.

The movie Chisum begins with its protagonist as an older man. His days of fighting, it seems, are over. He rules the land beneficently, speaking kindly of defeated Indian warriors, granting river access to poor Mexicans, offering the notorious murderer Billy the Kid a chance at redemption, and ensuring his young niece marries the right type of man. Frequently, he sits tall upon a horse on a hilltop and overlooks the land contemplatively and contentedly. Yet Chisum would not be a western if all the excitement and gun play were over. Soon, a crooked developer, Lawrence Murphy, begins trying to take over the town and territory, looking for ways to ruin Chisum. Chisum is determined to resolve things peaceably with the help of a buddy who is also a judge. But as one of Chisum’s cowboy companions, James Pepper, predicts, “all this speechifying . . . don’t amount to spit in the river. Only one thing’s gonna make this territory know who’s the bull of the woods. And sometime or sooner, it’s gonna happen. . . . It’s gonna be you and Murphy, head to head, horn to horn, and one hell of a fight. But one of you has got to lose so the other one walks away with the herd and the whole shebang.” Chisum has won the hard battles and basks in his bounty. But threats persist, and the old vigilante must be ever ready.

Advancing Chisum and, more broadly, the genre of the western, as a much-needed story of law, order and moral triumph amid a period of social unrest, Nixon pays homage to the cinematic career of California Governor Ronald Reagan. Further, he positions Reagan’s governorship to be read as a continuation of Reagan’s Hollywood story. As Governor, Reagan is a real cowboy, restoring law and order in a state shaken by the Civil Rights movement. As cowboy-Governor, Reagan attends to the outer boundaries of the state: inner-city, Black and Brown neighborhoods. [xliv] Procedural law supplies algorithms for the transmission, reproduction and exercise of White supremacy; White vigilantism holds space for White supremacy’s unmediated expression; and action cinema provides White supremacy with its heroes, foes, plots, symbols, metaphors, tropes and teleologies.

But just as the good guys are cinematic, so, too, are the bad guys. It is critical, therefore, as Nixon underscores, that viewers not confuse the two—that the bad guys not usurp the throne of legitimacy and honor.

Just as action cinema supplies political leaders with silver-screen charisma and unassailable, godlike powers of truth-making and final judgment, so, too, the cinematic dimensions of revolutionaries threaten to destabilize or overturn the storied metaphysics of White supremacy.

In the context of American White action cinema, Black American revolutionaries threaten two vital heroic figurations of Whiteness: the cowboy and the cyborg. Just as the legitimacy and might of Ronald Reagan’s or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political leadership is supported by Hollywood cowboy and cyborg incarnations of White, male, heteronormative virtues and authority, so, too, is it threatened by any real-world act of courage by the Other. When Jonathan Jackson, at the age of 17, storms the Marin County courthouse with a machine gun, disrupts a court in session, liberates Black prisoners, disarms the center’s security officers, takes a judge and jury hostage, and exits the center in a showdown with state and federal law enforcement agencies—he presents to the world and to history a quintessentially American example of underdog versus empire. By contrast, Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood antics look like what they are: fakery. At best, Reagan’s pretend courage warrants an Academy Award. By contrast, as George Jackson observes of Jonathan Jackson:

"It’s imperative . . . never to forget why he did what he did. And that was to stand as a symbol in front of the people—in front of me—and say in effect that we have both the capacity and the obligation to stand up, regardless of the consequences.

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He was saying that if we all stand up, our collective power will destroy the forces that oppose us. Jonathan lived by these principles, he was true to them, he died by them. This is the most honorable thing imaginable. He achieved a certain deserved immortality insofar as he truly had the courage to die on his feet rather than live one moment on his knees. He stood as an example, a beacon to all of us, and I am in awe of him . . . my younger brother." [xlv]

Jonathan embodied “the sort of courage that cause men of his age to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in somewhat different settings.” [xlvi]

While White Americans fantasize a bygone Wild West (“Old West”) and seek to harness its allure and influence by claiming it as a heritage, Black Americans, like Jonathan Jackson, are compelled by racialized state violence to fight. To quote Chisum, all the “speechifying . . . don’t amount to spit in the river.” Sooner or later, Jonathan Jackson must go “head to head, horn to horn” with American White supremacy. As Jonathan Jackson’s sister, Francis Chinn, explains: “You know how it is when you’re in school. You’re taught a lot of things. But when you see that things aren’t like you think they are, then you react, especially a young person growing up in this day and age. They react. They react violently, and especially when something is happening to maybe a person in your family—awful, dreadful, injustice is happening to someone in your family that you love and respect very dearly.” [xlvii]

White supremacy must counter the reality of Black rebellion in as many dimensions as possible (political, juridical, historical, and fantastical), lest the current reality be instantaneously remade. Black rebellion threatens White supremacy with immediate teleportation to a new realm, a new way of seeing, naming, knowing, being, acting and interrelating. It is, as Sun Ra observed, an astrophysical universal neural transmutation system. Black rebellion threatens White supremacy with time travel, remaking the past and lightspeed skipping towards a new future.

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Through the cowboy, White imaginaries mythologize the past. It is a past, however, increasingly antiquated: the open plains gone, the lands settled, the towns grown to cities. The very conditions of power for the cowboy’s iconic weapon, the revolver, are evaporating. Historically, people, assembled for social and commercial reasons, were targets for short-range, high velocity projectiles. Hence the staple scene of westerns: the gunslinger on a horse just outside of town, looking in. The global, decentralized virtual assemblies made possible and common through the net, however, subvert the prerequisites for the gun’s dominion. The gun is supplanted by the algorithm and virus. Concurrently, as historical conditions for the White cowboy’s power vanish, so, too, do scientific foundations for notions of race. By the mid-twentieth century, race is widely understood as “a political system that governs people by sorting them into social groupings based on invented biological demarcations.” [xlviii]

Enter the cyborg. Synthetically enhanced, the cyborg is a real super species—a measurably more powerful agency (designed by humans to surpass nature). The cyborg is measurably stronger, faster, and capable of storing, parsing, organizing, and leveraging vastly greater bodies of information/knowledge. Skin the cyborg White and White supremacy is newly embodied and future proofed. It is Whiteness for the Anthropocene.

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American media has generated numerous White cyborgs: Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, Steve Austin, Buck Rogers, Inspector Gadget, Otto Octavius, Alex Murphy, Darth Vader (a Black voice in a White body in a black exoskeleton), Terminator, etc. Recurrently, inherited or invested wealth and effortless genius are entry points for Whiteness to cyborg powers. To the question, “What are your super powers, again?”, Bruce Wayne/Batman answers, “I’m rich.” [xlix] Tony Stark is also enormously wealthy. Wayne and Stark are routinely figured as enhancing their cybernetic shells through ingenious research and development cycles they conduct in the privacy of their estate laboratories, Stark assisted by robots, Batman by his butler. Steve Austin is the six million dollar man, and Alex Murphy, as RoboCop, is financed by a mega corporation (OCP). [l]

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Blackness, however, also has avenues to ownership of cyborg identities. The historical, legislative and legal passage of Blacks in America from subhuman to human—from labor-providing property to citizen—is arguably the original Singularity, the original rise of the machines. The colonial imposition of the English language upon African slaves is arguably a type of implantation—a consciousness-affecting technology of the colonizer procedurally installed in the body of the colonized. And if Blackness is, as James Baldwin observes, “a condition,” it may be analogous to an exoskeleton. [li] Blackness itself, in its construction, may be understood as a “cerebral salvage” like that imagined by Masamune Shirow in the Japanese cyberpunk media franchise Ghost in the Shell. “Race itself,” observes Ruha Benjamin, “is a kind of tool.” [lii] Middle Passage may be understood as a procedure for the mass hulling of souls in new bodies. Through Middle Passage, the original cyborgs were bound and made for America. [liii] Indeed, comparing eighteenth-century diagrams of the Brookes slave ship with contemporary representations of the fantasy capsule of the Vita-Ray Chamber shows how Black histories of actual identity transfiguration lend credence and power to White, cyborg imaginaries like America’s “first super soldier”/Captain America (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

A canonical text of American literature and (neo)slave literature, footnote 07 of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Statement of Decision” (uncorrected version) illuminates the nature and operations of Whiteness “in a country in which there [is] a resident population . . . black, upon which the imagination [can] play.” [liv] It illustrates the construction and distribution of a 21st-century White imaginary, a state-sponsored fantasy legitimating and authorizing the execution, extermination, disposal and discardment of Black bodies. It further shows how White imaginaries are entwined productively and destructively with multiple, influential domains—political, juridical, carceral, cinematic, discursive and literary.

Whiteness may be described as a franchise. Researched, tested, and developed through colonial-settler projects, Whiteness, as a franchisor, licenses its know-how, procedures, intellectual property, business model, and brand to other settlers, producers and sellers—engendering a fluid and growing multi-agency ecosystem of socio-economic beneficiaries. All franchises are, by nature, a method for expansion, a means to outsourcing production to an otherwise unfeasibly broad spectrum of specialized makers. As a franchise, Whiteness enhances marketability and productivity for countless commodities and services, from storytelling formulas, cartoons and toys to professional dialects and protocols, riot control technologies and carceral architectures; further, traversing sectors with a common promise of increased outputs, Whiteness is not bound to any one process of production; it may, therefore, be made through all manner of labor—physical, intellectual, emotional, sexual, reproductive, and spiritual.

No portion of revenues and advantages augmented by a franchisee’s utilization of Whiteness is routed under agreement to an acknowledged franchisor, yet beneficiaries tend to be of consistently racialized and nationalized demographics (those demographics subject to redefinition—as anyone, really, can be anointed White, since ultimately there is no such thing). Under the auspices of free enterprise, Whiteness distributes wealth predictably to designated groups. Fusing illusions of free enterprise with realities of racialized subsidies, Whiteness is a system for generating racialized and nationalized group wealth alongside perceptions and sensations of victory and entitlement.

Opened in 1955, Disneyland concretized foundational logics of Whiteness in five (5) lands: Frontierland, Fantasyland, Adventureland, Main Street USA and Tomorrowland. The frontier is that yet to be penetrated, charted, conquered and possessed; fantasies of heroism and wealth mobilize conquerers; adventure reframes hardship, war, and ecological destruction—all prerequisite to converting the hostile frontier into the pleasant avenues, amenities, and mundane, economic opportunities of main street. Fusing time and space, Tomorrowland proposes an eternal frontier, always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, “new” powers to be exhibited over and against prior topographies.

In the operations of Whiteness, White imaginaries, or Fantasylands, play a uniquely generative role. “We are not controlled by economics,” said Kathy Acker, “we’re controlled by myths.” [lv] From White imaginaries flow meaning. White imaginaries generate the stories and truths politically, juridically, institutionally and representationally enacted. Further, as Disney underscored, White imaginaries are pronouncedly childish. They are puerile desires and dreams uncomplicated by opposing viewpoints, empathy, morality, or compassion. They effervesce in counterpoint to the illegitimate desires and aims of an Other, a bad guy, a villain—typically, someone who wants power all to themselves, unlike, for example, slaveholding plantation owners benevolently sharing their largess with subservient Blacks or Chisum offering poor Mexicans access to the waterways. In these childish realms, killing people with guns is, as Nixon says, “gun play.” Here, Black bodies may be stacked and toppled like wooden blocks—or, in historical terms, cargoed, hauled, and, as needed, cast overboard.

“To rebirth this nation and reimagine our world,” we need “new heroes, new founding mothers and fathers.” [lvi] We need new myths. We need new myths that render old systems, in all their permutations and reformations, fundamentally incoherent—beyond reason and meaning—and around which new relationships cohere. Ultimately, these new myths and this new nation must reckon with the horrors of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and racialized mass incarceration. That reckoning will require that we honor those who fought and died for freedom, who fought “the law” when the law was complicit in the systematic dehumanization and violent oppression of whole communities.

America’s reckoning with the sadistic and pathological enterprise of racism cannot succeed without including in places of the highest honor Black revolutionaries. George and Jonathan Jackson—these are the “good guys” in a just war; these are the founders of a more just society to come. This is common sense; and to acknowledge as much is not to embrace lawless violence, but to renounce it.