*A Psychoanalytic Approach to Identity Politics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105402*

standpoint of Arbery's particular manifestation of the universal property of "blackness" more accurately pinpoints the causal chain of events culminating in Arbery's death. Additionally, the dialectical interaction between necessity and contingency appears in the context of, what I call, "statistical intersectionality." At the conclusion of the previous section, I discussed the ways in which the Real often becomes coopted by the symbolic order for the sake of fortifying itself against dissension. Seshadri-Crooks [4], for instance, identified the appropriation of phenotypic differences between races in order to validate the persistence of racial classifications in naturalistic discourse. The symbolic, in short, shapes the Real to justify its supremacy, and the Real of identity politics (i.e., intersectionality) is no different.

With the advent of intersectional analyses of oppression, the assailed symbolic order has incorporated the categorical designations of intersectionality into statistical descriptions of criminality, violence, and aggression. "Black-on-black crime" is a striking example of the symbolic appropriation of intersectionality by whiteness [16]. Intersectionality, to reiterate, foregrounds an analysis of identity-based oppression at the crossing-point of marginalized signifiers; in turn, black-on-black crime (which also carries the assumption of male-on-male violence) adopts the perspective of intersectionality (through a concerted effort to understand the political situation of black identity in America) in order to demonstrate the extraordinary violence within black communities, absolving whiteness of any historical or contemporary role. Racial injustice is not the problem, as black-on-black crime indicates; instead, the black community sows the seeds of its own destruction. There is a litany of issues with the signifier at issue, but I would like to focus on the position of blackon-black crime within the dialectic of necessity and contingency. In Lacanian terms, "contingency" represents the saturation point, remainder, and leftover component of "necessity" as an ideological narrative, an implicit extension of Žižek's Hegelian analysis. Necessity disguises itself through the semblance of contingency: black-onblack crime highlights the violence emanating from within the black community, an internal chain of cause and effect wholly unaffected by external factors (i.e., racism, over-policing, poverty, etc.). Black communities, to fully present the racist presupposition underneath the signifier at hand, are said to ultimately introduce, choose, and foster criminality within their neighborhoods, selecting a non-necessary, contingent formation of social organization.

Historical forces that constitute the overwhelming influence of "necessity" on the formation of black communities (e.g., slavery, redlining, segregation, etc.) become blurred by the rationalization of black-on-black crime as a "contingent" explication of troublesome conditions in black communities. As contingency entirely supplants necessity, black communities (in accordance with the aforementioned narrative) could have constructed themselves in a different fashion, but they simply chose to be violent, dangerous, and crime-ridden. Black-on-black crime, in effect, effaces the historical discrimination preceding and currently surrounding the construction of black communities, localizing criminality within the black body itself and again completing the chain of signification linking those signifiers. Arbery's case does not stray from the demonstrated play of necessity and contingency. The fantastical motto of "wrong place, wrong time" shifts blame from a racially-motivated law enforcement system (necessity) to a black man jogging through a neighborhood (contingency), such that citizens can inquire into the contingency of Arbery's actions while, in the background, hinting at the necessity of his vulnerability: "what was he even doing there?," "why didn't he jog in his own neighborhood?," "couldn't he have jogged elsewhere?"
