Preface: Counter-racial formation theory / Barnor Hesse -- Introduction: Racial optimism and the drag of thymotics / P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods -- No reprieve : the "racial formation" of the United States as a settler-colonial empire (black power, white-sociology, and Omi & Winant, revisited) / Greg Thomas -- Being in the field : a reflection on ethnographic practice / P. Khalil Saucier -- Anti-blackness as mundane : black girls and punishment beyond school discipline / Connie Wun -- Strangers to the economy : black work and the wages of non-blackness / Tamara K. Nopper -- At the intersections of assemblages : fanon, capécia, and the unmaking of the genre subject / Patrice Douglass -- "Something of the fever and the fret" : antiblackness in the critical prison studies fold / Tryon P. Woods