Chapter 3 reveals how violent individuals and a violent state are structured in the Constitution. Here, violent, White self-determination (the right of White individuals to overthrow government) and liberalism (the systemic differences central to a liberal state) mix with republicanism (a decentralization of authority that privileges violent acts of citizens, a group most often defined as propertied, White men). In Article IV, Section 4, the Second Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, this chapter reveals the key formulations and tensions of American violence.

The introduction outlines the systemic violence that supports liberal society in early America. Focused on the Boston Massacre, it uses the courtroom representations of John Adams in defense of British soldiers to understand how hostile racial difference organized society and how such differences opened the way for the empowerment of White individuals. Here Whiteness and racial hierarchy become key markers in the formation of how violence is deployed in America.

The Epilogue links the book to Black Lives Matter activism and engages the work of Richard Hofstatder to explain the importance of thinking through American violence in a systemic manner.

This chapter begins with a discussion of contemporary critiques aimed at trauma theory, specifically how Lauren Berlant’s and Rob Nixon’s work urges us to attend to systemic and/or slow violence. The chapter argues that, rather than wholly discarding the discourses and applications of trauma theory, we can employ it to attend to the way trauma occurs in contexts of slow or systemic violence. As case studies, it turns to two contemporary narratives of post––Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Dave Eggers’s narrative nonfiction, Zeitoun (2009) and David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s serial television show, Treme (2009––13). These texts dramatize the human suffering that occurs at the intersections of traumatic rupture and ongoing systemic violence. The chapter notes the ways these texts situate New Orleans as a vividly unique American metropolis while simultaneously considering the ways they articulate national and international issues. In doing so, It also attends to the way these texts insist on larger historical contexts for the central moment of rupture –– Katrina –– that is the gravitational force of their narratives.