It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The Strait of Hormuz exists in the eye of the beholder.
While everyone agrees that, geographically speaking, it is a strait – a narrow sea passage connecting two places that ships want to go – its political and legal status is rather more complicated.
The United States and Iran both eye the strait – a choke point through which 20% of the world’s oil passes – very differently. Washington sees the Strait of Hormuz as exclusively an international waterway, whereas Tehran sees it as part of it territorial waters.
It follows that Iran’s toll-charging of ships is seen by the U.S. as illegal. Similarly, U.S. President Donald Trump’s blockade of the passage is a “grave violation” of sovereignty to Iran.
As an expert in the law of the sea, I know part of the problem is that the U.S. and Iran are living in two different worlds when it comes to the international laws governing the strait. Further complicating matters, both are in a different legal universe than most of the rest of the world.
The law of the sea
The “law of the sea” is a network of international laws, customs and agreements that set out the foundation for rights of access and control in the ocean. The framework sits apart from the laws of warfare, which are also relevant to the Persian Gulf situation.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, is a major plank of the law of the sea. Completed in 1982 and in force since 1994, it aims to create a stable set of zones and places – like international straits – where everyone agrees on who can do what. It has been ratified by 171 countries and the European Union, but not Iran or the United States. Iran has signed it but has yet to ratify; the U.S. has done neither.
This means that the rules which almost every country in the world has consented to can’t serve as a basis of agreement over how the U.S. and Iran should govern their actions in the strait during the current war.
The view from Iran
Both Iran and the U.S. agree that under the law of the sea, the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait, but not on what kind of international strait it is. Moreover, they disagree on the relevant laws that exist, and how they apply.
For Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait as set out under international law predating UNCLOS – notably the International Court of Justice’s ruling in the 1949 Corfu Channel case and the 1958 Territorial Seas Convention.
These older standards state that foreign ships have a right of “innocent passage” through international straits. Put in other terms, this means that if a ship is simply passing through, without doing anything else and without harming the security of the coastal countries, it must be allowed passage.
This gives Iran – and Oman, the strait’s other bordering country – power to make and enforce some rules over passage, such as rules for safety and the environment. They also have wide discretion to decide if passage is “non-innocent” and therefore not allowed. But it does not give them the right to impede innocent passage.
Contrary to the older standard, however, Tehran claims the right to “suspend” passage through its half of the strait, citing the waters as its territorial sea. This is a violation of the 1958 Territorial Seas Convention that Iran relies on for legal support, which says that when a territorial sea is also an international strait, innocent passage cannot be suspended.
The US interpretation
For the U.S., the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait requiring “transit passage,” as per UNCLOS. Although the United States is not a member of UNCLOS, it argues that the agreement’s updated concept of an “international strait” should apply.
Understanding a waterway as the newer type of “international strait,” which requires transit passage, shifts the balance against a coastal country’s control and toward free navigation.
Under this standard, countries bordering straits – like Iran and Oman in the case of Hormuz – must also allow overflight and submarines below the surface. Passage must be allowed so long as it is “continuous and expeditious.”
The U.S. has forcefully asserted this position at sea through regular “Freedom of Navigation” patrols through the Strait of Hormuz and other straits around the world. The patrols are a visible rejection of claims over the ocean that the U.S. deems illegal or excessive.
The basic U.S. argument is supported by some leading legal scholars, such as James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at the U.S. Naval War College, who decries the Iranian position as “lawfare” and argues that Iran must abide by the compromises made in UNCLOS.
A ‘persistent objector’
But the U.S. is a global outlier here, and one of only a handful of countries – alongside the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea – which argue that “transit passage” is required by custom.
Custom, in this sense, is established if a practice at sea is seen as consistent and is backed by wide agreement over its legality. If something is seen as customary law, it applies to everyone. The only way to prevent a custom from applying to you is through the “persistent objection rule,” which gives a country an exemption to newly emerging standards if it has shown itself to be consistently against it.
Legal scholars are split on whether transit passage is customary law – although law of the sea specialists tend to say it is not.
Tehran argues that even if transit passage were customary international law, Iran is a “persistent objector,” and therefore, the rule doesn’t apply to them.
And it is true that Iran’s objection has been consistent. Both Iran and Oman argued in favor of innocent passage, and against transit passage, at the UNCLOS negotiations.
Iran reaffirmed its perspective upon signing UNCLOS in 1982. Tehran argues that because transit passage is tied up in the compromises made by UNCLOS, only countries that ratify the treaty can claim the right to transit passage – and neither the U.S. nor Iran has ratified it.
Navigating troubled waters
The complex military situation and economic disruption are only part of the story of the Strait of Hormuz.
What lies beneath is a complicated legal situation. Not only do the U.S. and Iran disagree about the legal status of the strait, but the countries that flag oil tankers – and which are therefore responsible for them – must also navigate their own commitments and perspectives under the law of the sea.
Every nation wants to avoid a legal precedent that is contrary to its long-term interests. But for international law to function – to reduce conflict and enable trade – what is needed is an agreement about what rules exist, and a shared commitment to abide by them.
Only that would achieve a stable post-war status for the Strait of Hormuz. How we get there, however, requires navigating some very tricky waters.
Elizabeth Mendenhall is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Marine Affairs and Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. She received her PhD in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University in 2017.
This article appears courtesy of The Conversation and may be found in its original form here.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
Two Sanctioned Tankers May Have Bypassed U.S. Navy Blockade on Iran
The VLCC Alicia (VesselFinder / Chinmaya Mohapatra)
Despite U.S. Central Command's claims of a total lockdown of Iranian shipping, vessel tracking consultancies have identified Iran-linked, sanctioned tankers that appear to have transited the Strait of Hormuz without difficulty - with AIS enabled and publicly broadcasting their positions. AIS data can be manipulated, and the transits could not be immediately confirmed.
Within the last 24 hours, two sanctioned "shadow fleet" VLCCs - identified as IMO 9208215 (current name Rhn) and IMO 9281695 (current name Alicia) - appear to have transited the strait en route to Iran, according to TankerTrackers.com. Iran has officially claimed that the Alicia made a successful transit.
Together, the VLCCs have the capacity to take on about four million barrels of Iranian oil, which would be valued at about $400 million (if they can exit the Gulf and deliver to Iran's largely Chinese customers). Even without making the return journey out of the Gulf, they would still provide Iran with extra floating storage, enabling another three days of continued production without shut-ins.
The tankers' destination was predictable. "These two dames of steel have transported 60 million barrels of Iranian crude oil since 2023," wrote TankerTrackers.com.
CENTCOM maintains that the blockade is airtight, and says that it has already turned around about 10 outbound vessels with links to Iran. "American forces halted economic trade going into and out of Iran by sea," the command said in a statement Wednesday. "During the first 48 hours of the U.S. blockade on ships entering and exiting Iranian ports, no vessels have made it past U.S. forces."
So far, the U.S. Navy has not announced any boarding, search and seizure operations in connection with the blockade. An opposed boarding would be a step change in the campaign, and would be viewed as a violation of flag state sovereignty; the U.S. is said to be close to resuming formal peace talks with Iran, and may wish to avoid an escalatory act pending further diplomatic developments.
Shipping has been forewarned about the possibility of a boarding. U.S. forces have issued a stern notice to mariners, advising that any passing vessels could be "subject to interception, diversion, and capture" if it is discovered that they are headed to or from Iranian ports.
"Neutral vessels may still be subject to the right of visit and search to determine the presence of contraband cargo," the NOTAM advises. "Humanitarian shipments including food, medical supplies, and other goods essential for survival of the civilian populations will be permitted, subject to inspection."
Vessels that are headed to and from ports in other GCC nations are explicitly allowed to pass the U.S. naval cordon. AIS data suggests that among neutral vessels that choose to make a Hormuz transit, many appear to be taking the Iranian-controlled "Tehran Tollbooth" route near the island of Larak, complying with the terms of the Iranian blockade as well as the U.S. blockade. This includes the first unsanctioned, "clean" supertanker to make the crossing since the start of the U.S. blockade, the Malta-flagged Agios Fanourios I, transiting in ballast and bound for Iraq.
The U.S. Treasury is once again taking aim at the network of Iranian "shadow fleet" industry leader Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, son of senior Iranian advisor Ali Shamkhani, who was killed in an airstrike in February. The Shamkhani shipping network has moved millions of barrels of oil for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and it is a primary target of Treasury's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran's energy exports. In the latest round announced Tuesday, the department blacklisted nine vessels and more than a dozen companies and individuals linked to Shamkhani.
The Shamkhani network operates through reputable-looking front companies, many in the United Arab Emirates, where foreign interests intermingle in a lightly-regulated "free zone" business environment. In this new round of actions, Treasury sanctioned the holding company Oriel Group and a constellation of related Shamkhani affiliates, all based in the Emirates. These include Corplinx Consultancy; House of Shipping Investment FZCO; Meritron DMCC; Helmatic Consultancy DMCC; and Taylor Shipping FZCO.
Treasury also targeted more shadow-fleet vessels operated by the Shamkhani network, to include Aura (IMO 9274563), Horae (IMO 9413004), Versa (IMO 9379301), Anaya (IMO 9326885), Daphne V (IMO 9321677), Silvar (IMO 9291262), Cauveri (IMO 9282508), Bellaris (IMO 9332614), and Anika (IMO 9417464).
The new sanctions on the Shamkhani arrive just as Iran's state oil company is said to be shifting its trading and shipping operations back in-house, an adaptation to the high fatality rate among IRGC members who previously coordinated the gray-market trade. State-run news agency IRNA and Iranian outlet Tehran Times both claimed this week that the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) will take back exclusive control over the sale of the nation's oil - a shift away from the informal sales network operated by the IRGC.
As an additional action, Treasury also sanctioned an Iranian oil-for-gold trading scheme that provided support for the government of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro (now under arrest in the U.S.). The department identified Iranian national Seyed Naiemaei Badroddin Moosavi as a facilitator for the IRGC's oil sales, the profits from which were used to underwrite Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, an IRGC proxy force. One such scheme involved shipping Iranian oil into Venezuela in exchange for gold from the Maduro regime. The gold would then be resold in overseas markets.
Treasury identified two UAE-based companies, ACS Trading and Lotus Universal, as linked to Moosavi. An additional affiliated firm, ACS Global, is based in the Netherlands, the department said.
The US Navy is presently navigating an intensely complex geopolitical situation, balancing its deployments not only so as to be able to resume active operations against Iran in a week’s time, if the ceasefire should not be extended, but also shuffling assets for both deterrence and other contingencies.
The world’s attention is focused on the Strait of Hormuz and its approaches, as Central Command imposes a blockade on Iranian ships and those seeking to leave or enter Iranian ports, both within the Gulf and on the Gulf of Oman coast. So far, it seems as if CENTCOM has been able to impose effective control via radio communications with potential blockade-runners, without needing to physically board ships. But the naval presence is on hand to intervene physically – and also ready to resume active war fighting, at very short notice.
The contingency reinforcement appears to have two major elements. The San Diego-based Wasp Class landing ship USS Boxer (LHD-4), with F-35Bs and the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard, is a week away from reinforcing the Japanese-based USS Tripoli (LHA-7), which with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard is already in the CENTCOM area. Ready to reinforce the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) CSG also already active in the Arabian Sea, the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) CSG, last seen off Namibia, appears to be heading for the Cape of Good Hope escorted by Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers USS Donald Cook (DDG-75), USS Mason (DDG-87) and USS Ross (DDG-71), supported by the fast oiler USNS Arctic (TAOE-8).
The dispatch of the USS George H.W. Bush CSG on the long route from Virginia to the Arabian Sea suggests a desire not to provoke the Houthis into closing the Bab el Mandeb. The Iranians would dearly love the Houthis to do so at this particular juncture, when they are pressured and under blockade. But the United States is maintaining the ceasefire and providing no pretext for doing so – while still advertising a capability to respond should the Houthi leadership choose to resume their attacks on shipping.
In the meantime, the United States maintains a discreet presence in the northern Red Sea with Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers USS Bainbridge (DDG-96) and USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116), supported by Poseidon P-8A surveillance flights over the area. Keeping the Red Sea open for transit of oil from Yanbu to Asia is clearly extremely important for Saudi Arabia, so a non-provocative but ready-to-respond stance is clearly what is needed.
Should the blockade of Iranian ships and ports continue successfully, the next phase is likely to be the further roll-out of the mine clearance operation in the Strait of Hormuz. This will need those additional strike assets coming into theater, to deter and provide a response to any attempt by Iran to interdict shipping, but also a specialized mine clearance capability.
This appears to be on the way in the form of two Japanese-based Avenger Class mine countermeasures ships USS Chief (MCM-14) and USS Pioneer (MCM-9), which left Singapore heading west on April 10. These two ships are of the same class as the four minesweepers which were withdrawn from Bahrain immediately prior to the war.
Minesweeping-equipped Littoral Combat Ships USS Canberra, USS Tulsa and USS Santa Barbara departed the Gulf region prior to the beginning of hostilities, the latter two vessels ending up in Singapore; Canberra is reported to be under way in the Indian Ocean, and USS Tulsa was spotted transiting the Strait of Malacca westbound on April 3. There are also reports that the Royal Navy’s RFA Lyme Bay (L3007) is preparing to forward-deploy to Duqm in Oman with remote-controlled surface and submersibles, plus the Royal Navy’s Mine and Threat Exploitation Group on board. The Lyme Bay is still in Gibraltar, 10 day’s sailing from Duqm.
Completing the precautionary deployments, in the Eastern Mediterranean the USS Gerald R Ford and her escorts - including three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers - are 175 nm south of Cyprus, ready for an escalation of fighting both in Lebanon and Israel.
The presence off the coast of Ecuador of the carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68), escorted by Arleigh Burke destroyer USS Gridley (DDG-101), raises the intriguing possibility that it too is well-positioned to act as a reinforcement for CENTCOM. The Nimitz is heading in the right direction as it is due to round the Cape of Good Horn en route to Norfolk, Virginia, and scheduled for retirement. But the US Navy has recently announced the Nimitz will be kept in service for additional 10 months due to the delayed delivery of USS John F. Kennedy, the second Ford-class carrier.
The US Navy is certainly stretched, perhaps more so than at any time in the last 50 years. But balancing a readiness for operations with positioning to act as an effective deterrent, it is coping admirably with multiple, conflicting and sometimes unpredictable political priorities, in an exemplary manner which no doubt will feature strongly in future naval histories.
Iran-Linked Tankers Test Limits of U.S. Hormuz Blockade
While Iran-linked vessels appear to steer clear of the U.S. blockade outside the Strait of Hormuz, several ships have undertaken lengthy and winding routes in recent hours to move from the UAE coast to the actual Strait close to Iran’s shoreline.
At least two vessels linked to Iran and sanctioned by the United States entered the Persian Gulf on Thursday through a new route, ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
LPG carrier G Summer, broadcasting China owner and crew, has made its way into the Gulf by passing between Iran’s Larak and Qeshm islands. The Hong Lu, another vessel under U.S. sanctions due to ties with Iran, also moved through the same route shortly after, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg. The Hong Lu is a supertanker capable of carrying up to 2 million barrels of crude and was headed into the Persian Gulf empty. The vessel had briefly signaled Iraq’s Basrah as a destination, but now indicates it is waiting for orders.
Ship-tracking has not been a reliable assessment of how and which tankers move around the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman, as dark activity and spoofing have flourished since the Iran war began.
“During the first 48 hours of the U.S. blockade on ships entering and exiting Iranian ports, no vessels have made it past U.S. forces,” the U.S. Central Command said on Wednesday.
“Additionally, 9 vessels have complied with direction from U.S. forces to turn around and return toward an Iranian port or coastal area.”
Yet, observed AIS positioning and vessel traffic suggest Iran-linked vessels have been in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, maritime intelligence firm Windward said in its daily note on Wednesday.
“Between April 14 and 15, an empty, falsely flagged, U.S.-sanctioned VLCC was observed entering the Strait inbound via Iranian territorial waters, likely using coastal positioning to reduce exposure, and is similarly assessed as a blockade-breaking movement,” the firm said.
“Iranian export activity continues, supported by loading at Kharg Island and deceptive operational patterns, including spoofing and reduced visibility.”
Concluded Windward, “The operating environment is defined by simultaneous enforcement, evasion, and selective movement, with vessel behavior evolving in real time as the practical limits of the blockade are tested.”
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
Friday, March 06, 2026
Beyond mining: Oklahoma bets on refining to anchor US critical minerals supply chain
As the United States races to secure supplies of critical minerals, much of the policy discussion has focused on opening new mines. But industry leaders say the bigger bottleneck lies further down the value chain: refining, processing and manufacturing.
In Oklahoma, state officials believe they have found an opportunity in that gap.
Rather than positioning itself as a mining jurisdiction, the state is building a strategy around processing critical minerals into usable industrial materials — aluminum, rare earth magnets and batteries essential to aerospace, defense and advanced manufacturing.
A series of early-stage proposed investments and federal funding programs are now converging around that vision.
The goal is to plug Oklahoma into the middle of the domestic supply chain as the United States works to reduce dependence on overseas processing from China.
“Here in Oklahoma we’re not actually doing the mining of these minerals,” Jay Shidler, Advanced Technology Project Manager at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce told MINING.com in an interview. “It’s around the refining and the production side — being part of the supply chain that turns these materials into finished products.”
“One of the things we’re really focused on is strengthening domestic supply chains and not being dependent on other countries for these materials,” Shidler said.
The “missing middle” of the supply chain
For decades, the US gradually ceded much of the world’s mineral processing capacity to other countries. China built a dominant position refining rare earths and producing permanent magnets, key components used in everything from electric vehicles to defense systems.
As geopolitical tensions have grown and supply chain vulnerabilities have become more apparent, Washington has shifted its attention toward rebuilding domestic capacity.
Federal incentives, including funding tied to the CHIPS and Science Act and other industrial policy initiatives, have begun encouraging companies to establish processing and manufacturing facilities inside the US.
Industry analysts increasingly describe this stage of the value chain as the “missing middle” — the industrial infrastructure that connects raw materials to finished products.
Oklahoma’s pitch to investors centers on filling that gap.
The state’s strategy emphasizes refining, magnet manufacturing, recycling and smelting rather than primary mineral extraction.
Shidler said the approach aligns with broader national priorities around onshoring supply chains and supporting defense manufacturing.
A $4 billion aluminum bet
The most prominent project tied to Oklahoma’s emerging strategy is a proposed aluminum smelter from Emirates Global Aluminium.
The company announced plans to invest roughly $4 billion in a facility near Tulsa at the Port of Inola, a logistics hub that offers barge access for bulk materials moving through the U.S. inland waterway system.
Construction has been forecast to begin as early as 2026.
If completed, the plant would represent one of the largest aluminum investments in the US in decades.
Aluminum remains a critical industrial metal for aerospace, defense and transportation applications. However, the number of operating U.S. smelters has declined significantly over the past several decades due to high energy costs and global competition.
Power and location advantages
In Oklahoma, the combination of wind generation and natural gas resources gives the state a structural advantage, Shidler said.
The State produces roughly 65% more energy than it consumes, according to state figures, with a significant portion of that supply coming from wind power. It’s also a major producer of natural gas.
Those energy resources translate into relatively low electricity costs — a critical consideration for aluminum smelting and other heavy industrial processes.
Location also plays a role in the state’s pitch.
The Port of Inola, where the proposed EGA smelter would be located, is often described as the furthest inland ice-free port in the United States. Through the McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, the port connects to the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico, allowing raw materials to move inland by barge.
Combined with Oklahoma’s central location in the United States, the infrastructure allows materials to move relatively efficiently to manufacturing hubs across the country.
Rare earth magnets and national security
Another pillar of Oklahoma’s critical minerals strategy involves rare earth magnets — a technology that has become increasingly important for defense systems and advanced manufacturing.
USA Rare Earth is developing a vertically integrated rare earth magnet manufacturing facility in the State. The company is building a magnet manufacturing facility in Stillwater, a project that has received roughly $1.6 billion in funding from the Department of Commerce and from the private sector.
Permanent magnets made from rare earth elements such as neodymium and praseodymium are essential components in electric motors, precision guidance systems, wind turbines and a range of other technologies.
Yet global magnet production remains heavily concentrated in China.
The United States currently has limited domestic capacity to manufacture these magnets at scale, making them a key focus of industrial policy efforts.
Building that capability inside the country is seen as an important step toward securing supply chains for both civilian industries and defense systems.
Stardust Power (NASDAQ: SDST) in February joined the Cornerstone Consortium to Support U.S. Critical Minerals and Industrial Base Resilience.
Stardust is advancing development of its lithium refinery in Muskogee, with major engineering work completed and key permits secured, Stardust Managing Director, Oklahoma, John Riesenberg told MINING.com.
The project has secured a major offtake agreement with Sumitomo, and established multiple feedstock supply partnerships, Riesenberg said, adding that construction is expected to lead to commercial production roughly 24 months after initial construction begins.
said they are actively working to attract companies across the supply chain — from refining and recycling to component manufacturing.
Defense and aerospace demand
Another reason Oklahoma believes it can sustain such a cluster lies in its existing aerospace and defense industries, Oklahoma Department of Commerce officials said.
Aerospace and defense is already the state’s second-largest and fastest-growing industrial sector. Oklahoma hosts five military installations, including Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City.
Tinker is widely considered the largest maintenance, repair and overhaul facility in the world, supporting aircraft and equipment used by the U.S. military.
The broader context for Oklahoma’s efforts is the evolution of the United States’ critical minerals strategy, Shidler noted.
Five years ago, much of the discussion centered on restarting domestic mining operations after decades of decline, but that conversation has expanded rapidly.
Policy makers increasingly recognize that mining alone cannot solve supply chain vulnerabilities. Without refining, processing and manufacturing capacity, raw materials must still be sent overseas to become usable products.
That realization has shifted attention toward building industrial capacity across the entire value chain.
Whether Oklahoma ultimately becomes a major processing hub remains to be seen. But the projects now being proposed suggest that the next phase of America’s critical minerals strategy may be less about digging new mines — and more about rebuilding the industrial infrastructure needed to turn those minerals into finished materials.
Friday, February 27, 2026
Interview Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish the Police
“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism.
Under Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started appearing ever more like a private militia, unleashing brutal violence against families and displaying sycophantic loyalty to Trump as he mandates the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants.
In the days since January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti and 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, it’s not surprising that ICE has begun drawing even more frequent comparison to Hitler’s fascist Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
As I’ve borne witness to these tragedies, I’ve often thought about how Black people meet this moment with an already-acute sense of what it means to live and die under the U.S.’s fascistic logics. For Black people, there were no killers in brown shirts, but there were plenty of killers in white sheets sanctioned through the support, encouragement, and participation of white law enforcement officers. The depth and complexity of what I’m feeling and thinking about this brutal historical resonance cries out for clarity and truth-telling. It is for this reason that I reached out to Robin D. G. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and author of several renowned books, including his newest and forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life.
George Yancy: Robin, it is always an honor. As you said to Amy Goodman, “Jim Crow itself is a system of fascism, when you think about the denial of basic rights for whole groups of people, the way in which race is operating as a kind of nationalism against some kind of enemy threat, the corralling of human beings in ghettos. I mean, this is what we’ve been facing for a long time.” The point here is that this isn’t new. And we mustn’t forget. In The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen write, “On December 17, 1951, the US Civil Rights Congress, headed by Communist attorney William Patterson, presented a 240-page petition to the United Nations general assembly, entitled ‘We Charge Genocide.’” The charge of genocide was necessary, as it continues to be, because of the terror of anti-Blackness in this country, a form of terror that renders Black life fundamentally precarious and vulnerable to the forces of gratuitous state violence. I often fail to find the discourse to frame the ongoing history of anti-Blackness in this country. We’re not just talking about anti-Black beliefs and attitudes; it’s anti-Black fascism. I would like for you to talk about how war is an apt concept for critically thinking about the meaning and reality of anti-Blackness in the past and in the present.
Robin D. G. Kelley: Absolutely! No question! Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism, which as you acknowledged, not only precedes the so-called “classical” fascism in Italy and Germany, but for Hitler and the Third Reich, a model for the racist and antisemitic Nuremberg laws. By the way, Robyn Maynard, a brilliant scholar/organizer, has an essay coming out in the Boston Review that maps out the history of anti-Blackness in U.S. immigration policies.
“Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism.”
To your question, there are so many examples. Beginning in the present, we must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population, Africans. It didn’t matter that the vast majority were U.S. citizens. Trump denigrated the entire community as “garbage” and declared: “I don’t want them in our country.” If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.
Let’s also remember that the core anti-immigrant dog whistle that both Trump and JD Vance exploited in the run-up to the elections targeted Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who had temporary protected status. The racist lies that Haitians were eating their (white) neighbors’ dogs (a literal dog whistle!) was strategic and, apparently, it worked.
“We must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’ in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population.”
But we can’t put all of this on Trump. Besides the long, long history of political, economic, military, and discursive war against the Haitian people, I can never erase the image of Haitian asylum seekers who had taken shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, being violently herded and brutalized by ICE agents on horses, as if they were fugitive slaves. It was the Biden-Harris administration, let’s not forget, that denied Haitians asylum and deported them in record numbers. More Haitians were deported under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their first few weeks in office than under Trump during his entire first term. Now, some might argue that Biden and Harris expanded the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program, which grants “parole” to eligible migrants waiting for visas (dig the carceral language), but all this means is that they were granted temporary protections that forced them into low-wage, precarious work since their status was contingent on having a job, any job.
Let’s come back to the present. We all learned of the horrific murder of 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. here in Southern California on New Year’s Eve. In case readers don’t know the story, Porter stepped outside his apartment and did what a lot of people do: fired off a few celebratory rounds from his rifle into the sky. Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent who had recently moved into the same complex, wasn’t having it, so he put on his tactical gear, grabbed his weapons, went outside without identifying himself, and fatally shot Porter. The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] officers dispatched to the scene never asked Palacios to surrender his weapon, never gave him a sobriety test, didn’t investigate anything, really. The Department of Homeland Security’s liar-in-chief, Tricia McLaughlin, spun the incident as a “brave officer” taking out an “active shooter” after an exchange of gunfire. It just wasn’t true; every eyewitness confirmed there was no “exchange” of fire or hostilities. It was murder.
“If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.”
This happened a week before Renee Nicole Good’s death, and yet Porter’s name is not mentioned among the martyrs of the anti-ICE resistance, except when Black folks complain about it. Not to take anything away from the extraordinary sacrifice made by Good and Pretti, but Porter was not white and he was not killed in the act of trying to stop ICE and protect his neighbors. Whereas Porter, much like George Floyd, was rendered a victim whose worthiness was constantly called into question, Good and Pretti were martyrs with whom it is impossible not to empathize.
Porter’s family and friends were pressed to do what Black families always do when they lose a loved one to state violence: reclaim his character by showing that he was a loving, doting father who called his mother every day, worked hard, and made everyone laugh. They had to make him human, to inform the (white) world that his life had as much value as that of Good and Pretti. It’s tired and should be unnecessary, and to her credit, even Renee Good’s sister, Annie Ganger, felt the need to remind people that the violence that took her sister’s life “isn’t new” and that it was unfair that “the way someone looks garners more or less attention. And I’m so sorry that this is the reality.” Meanwhile, the “brave” ICE agent (whose name the LAPD initially refused to release), it turned out, had a reputation for anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, [allegations of perpetrating] child abuse, and had once showed up at a youth sporting event armed.
“The movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional.”
The point I’m trying to make here isn’t simply that Keith Porter needs to be acknowledged but rather the violence that stole him from his family not only “isn’t new,” it is routine. As a Black man who was native to Compton, California, he had an invisible target on his back. He knew what it is like to live in a police state. Premature death at the hands of armed agents of the state is merely a hazard of being Black in America. This is why the movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional, insisting that they are part of a larger matrix of state violence encompassing all law enforcement and the military. It’s not enough to “abolish ICE”; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety. With regards to Keith Porter, of course randomly shooting a gun in the air is not safe and should not be permitted, but we have to address the reasons he even owns a gun. He and so many other folks like him just don’t feel safe, and U.S. settler culture is rooted in violence as a first response and guns as the chief instrument of violence. Police simply don’t help. Abolition requires changing the culture, not just eliminating the instruments of the culture.
Assuming that war is an apt concept, what does this mean in terms of how we ought to respond? I ask you this question with sincerity. There are those who will say, “Oh, Yancy must believe in armed struggle on the streets of America.” This would be a non sequitur. There is too much of my mother’s Christian sensibilities in me to hold this position. Indeed, I try, I struggle, to manifest agape (the sense of unconditional neighborly love) toward all human beings. But I love my children as you love your daughter. Indeed, for me, that love refuses a form of hospitality that facilitates their harm. I can’t possibly stand by when the Brownshirts come hammering at the door with fascistic bloodlust in their eyes. Here I’m reminded of Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die.” Toward the end he writes:
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
I appreciate your invocation of Claude McKay. As you know, that poem is almost always cited as an expression of the so-called New Negro, the spirit of defiance that suddenly erupts in the wake of World War I and the “Red Summer” of 1919. But this is a misnomer since Black communities had been practicing armed self-defense since they were dragged to these shores. Armed self-defense is the tradition; nonviolent civil disobedience is the rupture, the break with the past. The historical record is clear and unambiguous, as we’ve seen in the writings (memoirs and scholarship) of Robert and Mabel Williams, Akinyele Umoja, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Kellie Carter Jackson, Lance Hill, Jasmin Young, Nicholas Johnson, Simon Wendt, and many others. These writers have shown us, time and time again, that African Americans have a very long and surprisingly successful tradition of armed self-defense against mob violence. Armed self-defense has saved countless lives.
“It’s not enough to ‘abolish ICE’; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety.”
To be fair, militant nonviolent civil disobedience also courageously faces “the murderous, cowardly pack” and is undeniably “fighting back.” But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first impulse to keep a pistol by his bedside during the Montgomery bus boycott to protect his family against organized, state-sanctioned mob violence made perfect sense. You can’t win the racist mob or the brownshirts over with love, certainly not in the midst of war. This is why I find those commercials featuring an ICE agent who comes home to his kids and has his conscience suddenly pricked by a child’s query so frustrating, naïve, and ineffectual. If conscience mattered, the faces and screams of the people they brutalized, the lives they took, and the loved ones who had to bear witness would have convinced most of these dudes to quit their jobs long ago.
This kind of terror is not new; ICE and Border Patrol agents have been behaving like this for decades. Stephen Miller didn’t have to tell them what to do. Restraint must come before reeducation and redemption, and imposing restraint is impossible without consequences and accountability. As Dr. King said repeatedly in various speeches, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”
War is certainly an apt concept here. It is how I frame the assault on Black people in my forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. As I write in the book, “Policing is war by another name…. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has turned many Black neighborhoods into killing fields and open-air prisons, stripping vulnerable residents of equal protection, habeas corpus, freedom of movement, even protection from torture.” But as the anthropologist Orisanmi Burton put it in his book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, this is not a war we chose. He refers to sites of incarceration as “sites of counter-war,” which can be extended to virtually all Black and Black-led resistance to injustice, mob rule, criminalization, state violence, exploitation, and the very conditions that make Black people vulnerable to premature death. This counter-war holds out the possibility of freeing everyone, including those recruited to maintain systems of domination.
That said, I think the debate over whether we’re ready to go to war is a false debate because we’re already at war. We were at war before Trump came into office, before the neoliberal turn, before Jim Crow, before all of that. It begins with the kidnapping and trafficking of our African ancestors, and the violent dispossession of our Indigenous ancestors. Both processes fall under the category of genocide. John Brown was right to call American slavery “a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.” These wars are fundamentally about turning flesh and earth into property, and whole peoples into combatants and commodities.
We have to consider the centuries of continuous, protracted war. Once we acknowledge the reality of protracted war and counter-war, then we have to stretch our definition of “armed struggle.” In this asymmetrical war, guns are not the only weapons. Arson has been a weapon of the enslaved in their own counter-war against Christians holding them in bondage. Minneapolis is where they burned down the police station. Civil resistance has taken on so many forms that don’t fall neatly under traditional categories of “violence” or nonviolence, and have revealed the wide arsenal of “arms” people have deployed in struggle.
Again, in Making a Killing, which is as much if not more about collective resistance (counter-war) than acts of state violence (war), I write about rebellion in Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, New York, and elsewhere, and building on the work of Akinyele Umoja, who wrote We Will Shoot Back, I chart the tradition of armed self-defense in Mississippi in light of the police-perpetrated killing of Jonathan Sanders in 2015. Once we acknowledge the long war and redefine armed struggle, we’ll recognize that we’re already in it. We have to figure out what to do, how to strategize, and what it means when casualties of war are white people — which, of course, is not a new thing. It’s a rare thing and ebbs and flows, depending on the extent to which white people see this as their fight.
Your book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination was published in 2002. That was 24 years ago. For many, it is no doubt hard to dream, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. There are times when I try to fall asleep at night and I become obsessed with a singular nightmare: the creation of private militias that have state approval to throw me in jail for writing something or for refusing to embrace Trump’s fascism or our having this discussion. I see hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity. I see so many people being disappeared. I see American-style gulags. I see the complete disregard and overthrow of the Constitution where there are no checks and balances, where there is no longer a two-party system, where due process is nonexistent, and there are literally no exits out of this country. I see my neighbor turning me in because I expressed hatred toward white supremacy and shouted, “Love First!” over “America First!” In this case, perhaps all of those who care about freedom, community, their neighbors, and the importance of democracy “will find out,” as Trump said about Chicago, “why it’s called the Department of WAR.” I believe in the power of movements, but Trump is malicious and I have no doubt that he would, if given the opportunity (perhaps I should say, when given the opportunity), unleash the full might of the Department of War on us. How do we continue to dream, Robin, to have freedom dreams, when the U.S. continues to amplify the reality of dystopic nightmares?
I do want to make a case for the value of “freedom dreams” in times like these. I’m always reminding readers that what I called the Black radical imagination is not wishful thinking, not an escape from reality, not some kind of dream state conjured and nurtured independent of the day-to-day struggles on the ground. The main point of the book is that the radical visions animating social movements are forged in collective resistance and a critical, clear-eyed analysis of the social order. In fact, in the 20th-anniversary edition which came out in 2022, I underscore this point, writing, “The book does not prioritize ‘freedom dreams’ to the exclusion of ‘fascist nightmares.’ If anything, I show that freedom dreams are born of fascist nightmares, or, better yet, born against fascist nightmares.” The context in which I wrote it, the early Bush years, was decidedly an era of dystopic nightmares: a wave of police killings, culminating in the massive response to the murder of Amadou Diallo, 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, accelerating neoliberalism, and so forth. Moreover, the movements I explore imagined freedom in the darkest of times: Black Exodus out of an Egyptland of lynching, disfranchisement, new forms of slavery, and segregation; Black embrace of socialist revolution at the height of fascism, global economic crisis, and anti-communism; and Black radical feminism in a moment of heightened sexual violence, femicide, carceral expansion, and an increasingly masculinist Black freedom movement.
In other words, all of these movements were fueled not by false optimism but by a deep understanding of the death-dealing structures of gendered racial capitalism. Freedom dreaming, as it were, is not a luxury; our survival as a people depends on envisioning a radically different future for all and fighting to bring it into existence. The fight or the struggle is precisely how visions of the future are forged, clarified, revised, or discarded.
I just mentioned the power of movements. Coming back to Freedom Dreams, you argue that that there is more that is needed to fight for freedom than organized protest, marches, sit-ins, strikes, and slowdowns. For you, surrealism is also necessary. You write, “Surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality (which is like rationalization, the same word they use for improving capitalist production and limiting people’s needs).” When I read that passage again, I thought of the power of poiesis — that sense of creation or that sense of bringing something that is radically new into being. Speak to how surrealism continues to inform your understanding of liberation and perhaps even hope amid so much fear, pain, anger, and perhaps, like for me, nightmarishness.
Really great question, one I continued to ponder after writing Freedom Dreams. A critical argument I make in that chapter and elsewhere is that the Africans across the diaspora had been practicing or living surrealism long before Europeans named it. I gave examples, one being the blues. I left it undeveloped in the book, but since then have been thinking about the blues alongside Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, the brilliant geographer Clyde Woods, and French surrealist whom I don’t mention in Freedom Dreams, Pierre Naville. The blues, not just as music but epistemology, can be defined as a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity — or, in your words, so much fear, pain, anger, and nightmarishness. True, rising nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, neoliberalism, and the relative weakness of contemporary mass movements offers little reassurance that a liberated future is on the horizon. But the blues, as with the Black radical imagination, resists fatalism and inevitability. It demands and narrates action.
“We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders.”
This is where I find Pierre Naville helpful. A founding member of the Paris Surrealist group and one of the first to join the Communist Party, in 1926 he published a pamphlet titled “The Revolution and Intellectuals,” which argued, among other things, that pessimism was not a reason for despair, withdrawal, melancholy, or bitterness. What he called the “richness of a genuine pessimism” (which he traced to Hegel’s philosophy and “Marx’s revolutionary method”) requires action and must take political form. Naville’s revolutionary pessimism was a critique of the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union and the imminent fall of capitalism. It was also a critique of the “shallow optimism” of social democrats who believed that they could eventually vote their way into creating a socialist commonwealth. His revolutionary pessimism was not fatalistic resignation or an obsession with the “decline” of elites or nations or Western civilization. Rather, it was a call for collective revolutionary action by, and on behalf of, the oppressed classes. Revolutions are not inevitable, nor do they correspond with particular objective conditions. People just don’t have the luxury to wait for the “right conditions.” Instead, movements must interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe, by any means necessary. It is not enough to “hope,” we must be determined.
George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).
