17 Social Text 152 • September 2022 Social Text 152 • Vol. 40, No. 3 • September 2022 DOI 10.1215/01642472-9771035 © 2022 Duke University Press Can Black Lives Matter in a Black Country? Deborah A. Thomas This essay interrogates a relation. It probes the project of security (which I am defning as the protection of whiteness, class hierarchy, and het- eropatriarchy) in relation to the desire for safety (which I will gloss as “having somebody”). In probing this relation within a context in which police violence and extrajudicial killing are not typically seen as part of the global phenomenon of anti-Black racism, it seeks to contribute to a conversation in which raciality is not tethered to physicality, but instead is grounded in both historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phe- nomena that produce whiteness as the apex of humanity in the modern West. 1 This production presumes not only transparency and universal- ity, but also determination and causality. 2 In other words, having defned itself as universal reason and absolute perspectivity, the interior humanity against which all exterior Others are compared and measured (and found wanting), Western European empire inhabits the expression of sover- eignty, not only within Europe but also throughout the postcolonial world and its diasporas. This sovereignty is obsessed with security, which Laurence Ralph has defned as “both the nostalgic yearning for a previous era and the regulation and surveillance of bodies.” 3 It is obsessed with security because its con- quest, cannibalism, and disavowal of exteriority is never seamless nor com- plete. It is always potentially undone by that which fails to recognize it, by that which refuses it in intentional and unconscious ways. In Jamaica, these moments of refusal have been both quotidian/feeting and transnational/ durative, and these categories are themselves co-constituting. I will proceed by exploring the relation between security and safety through the rubric of diaspora in two senses—frst as a phenomenon of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-pdf/40/3 (152)/17/1636963/17thomas.pdf?guestAccessKey=a38bf886-cccf-450e-a063-3cfb3f85d224 by UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA user on 04 October 2022