I write this review as protestors fill the streets in the United States and around the world to demand an end to anti-Black police violence and to defund the police. #GeorgeFloyd, #BreonnaTaylor, #AhmaudArbery. The mainstream US media engages in its ritual defamation of Black rage to delegitimise protestors and erase the structural anti-Blackness that exposes Black lives and geographies to premature death in the Americas (Ruth Wilson Gilmore). Black scholars and activists again question the necessity of replaying Black death as spectacle, an act that both re-traumatises Black viewers and raises questions about what, in fact, can elicit White empathy for Black suffering (Saidiya Hartman).

João H. Costa Vargas’ The Denial of Antiblackness offers fundamental insights that capture the mechanics of anti-Black racism and the complex contradictions shaping this historical moment. The Denial of Antiblackness incorporates Vargas’ knowledge and expertise developed over two decades of research on racial states and cooperation with Black community organisations in Brazil and the United States. The book is a compelling and necessary read, as it challenges the terms of much anti-racist politics, intellectual and activist work as well as the nature of collective struggle for equity within ‘current formations of empire states’ like the United States and Brazil (p. 25).

Drawing primarily from the field of Black studies, the introduction expounds a multi-layered framework that brings important conceptual frameworks like social death, the afterlife of slavery, structural antagonism and the people-of-colour framework into dialogue. In an analysis illuminating for readers both familiar and unfamiliar with this field, Vargas sets up one of his key arguments: ‘To analyse the Black subject's embattled presence is to evaluate the conditions of possibility, the promises, the shortcomings of our contemporary progressive multiracial political projects’ (p. 48). This embattled presence persists because of the anti-Black ontological foundations of the category ‘human’ and the dependence of non-Black freedom on the subjection and abjection of Black people.

Part 1 of the book analyses the experiences of Black and ‘Latinx’ youth in juvenile detention centres in Austin, Texas, where Vargas assisted in poetry writing workshops. Exploring the ‘mechanics of institutionalisation’, Chapter 1 challenges conceptions of the school-to-prison pipeline as a linear entrenchment of youth into incarceration via the education system, juvenile detention and, later, adult imprisonment. Rather, the author illustrates these interrelated spaces that produce Black dispossession, hyper-surveillance and confinement as a transgenerational and cyclical process that moves forward and backward in time in ways that deeply enmesh Black people and geographies (pp. 72, 133). In Chapters 2 and 3, Vargas details youths’ experiences and the social dynamics of the juvenile prison. Analysis of stanzas and poems written by young people illustrates the different ways they engage with the conditions that led to their confinement and the different understandings among Black and Latinx youth of what awaits them after detention. These varied understandings evocatively show that, while the logics of anti-Blackness (surveillance, segregation, carcerality) encompass a range of societal institutions and non-Black groups, Black dispossession is incommensurable with the racism and dehumanisation of other groups. This structural antagonism creates ‘oblique identification’, a concept Vargas develops throughout the book to encapsulate non-Black recognition of the conditions and effects of anti-Blackness that falls short of recognising anti-Blackness as foundational to Western societies. Chapters 2 and 3 also examine the differentiated experiences of young Black men and women in juvenile detention, respectively.

Part 2 of the book analyses police violence and social protest in Brazil to expand our understanding of oblique identification, a people-of-colour (multiracial) framework and the disavowal of anti-Blackness as foundational. Chapter 4 explores ‘Black disidentification’ with the 2013 public protests that took place nationally regarding government corruption and improvement of public services. Black disidentification reveals the Black subject is non-political and non-rights bearing in a system shaped by (and for) White civil society. Using rolezinhos (large, predominantly Black gatherings of youth in middle-class malls) and arrastões (beach robberies), Vargas examines the fear produced by ‘out of place’ Black people as an index of the differential humanity represented in the ‘privileges of belonging, property, and personhood’ (p. 172). Chapter 5 focuses on the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (Pacifying Police Units, UPPs) instituted via Rio de Janeiro's new security paradigm established to both control and appease, rather than repress, people in poor, historically Black areas of the city. Combining analysis of the police torture and murder of Amarildo de Souza and subsequent protests, Vargas illustrates how multiracial indignation at his death involves a persistent hope for multiracial redemption of the nation. This results from an inability and unwillingness to ‘engage [with] anti-Blackness as an overdetermining, irreducible, and indeed foundational element of the Brazilian formation’ (p. 207).

Part 3 of the book deepens even further the analysis of multiracial logics that delimit anti-racist struggle and community work. Chapter 6 analyses the work of Los Angeles community activist and former Black Panther Michael Zinzun, whose excellent work challenging police violence still sought integration into and correction of the empire-state's institutions rather than their overthrow. For Vargas, Zinzun represents the Black cyborg, the figure that mediates the relationship between the non-Black and Black lifeworlds (p. 212). In Chapter 7, Vargas examines how Black cyborgs facilitate oblique identification and operate through a people-of-colour framework to produce the dichotomy of acknowledgement of Black suffering/denial of structural anti-Blackness, which inhibits dismantling the foundational status of anti-Blackness to the state. The concluding chapter contrasts the figure of the cyborg and slave, where the latter (drawing on Frantz Fanon) ‘has no demands other than the complete destruction of the reigning ideological and social order’ (p. 266). To embrace social death and the slave as constitutive of Black positionality is the only way to chart transcendence, where transcendence ‘is the opposite of reform’ and the ‘negation of [White supremacist] institutional calibration’ (p. 269). Confronting anti-Blackness in its far-reaching existence, then, is the only transformative means to revalue Black life and remake Black being in Brazil, the United States and beyond.