Race, Racism, and the Biopolitical Frontier by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#24, JUNE-AUG/2017

The socio-historical constitution of ‘race’ as a rational signification of subhumanity epistemologically inaugurates the biopolitical frontier of a western imperialist continuum. As such, contrary to conventional wisdom, ‘race’ is not a neutral category meant to merely describe and classify diverse cultures experiencing a shared humanity. Indeed, since its earliest discursive formulations, ‘race’ provides an anthropological imperative coinciding with a systematic global praxis of coloniality that inscribes modernity itself with objective violence against human ‘being’.

Any discursive allegiance to ‘race’ as an ontology divorced from historical genesis, mystifies techniques and technologies of western imperialist power which continuously renew a socio-historical coherence of imperial topography through institutional mechanisms of discipline and regulation which globally cement a lived hierarchal positionality between an imperial mainstream of modernity and a socio-ontological underground. Therefore, the biopolitical alterity of ‘race’ reinvests the normative gaze with an epistemological legitimacy which then sustains the structural-inert foundations of western imperialist power through varied reconfigurations of racism.

These reconfigurations of racist orientations are not mutually exclusive or ultimately exhaustive however, as they often combine, complement, and coalesce together according to the dictates of the normative gaze of modernity. “Racism, as we have seen, is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people.” [1]

Objective racism, as the pre-reflective belief in ‘race’ as a neutral and rational category grounded in what is conventionally posited as scientifically objective (materialist, biological, anthropological) ‘facts’, functions as the condition of possibility for a considerable plethora of racist orientations. And yet, it is the affective and ideological orientations of racism with which we are most familiar.

Affective racism, as obvious, socially visible, and behaviorally distinguishable expressions of hatred, mobilizes around social alienation, cultural ignorance, and emotional self-contempt of exploited masses seeking to compensate for actual lack of power with privileges born of alliance with the ruling power elite against a ‘racialized’ Other.

Ideological racism, as an epistemological orientation which discursively assists in displacing responsibility of structural-inert oppression away from systematic socio-historical praxis of established power, and towards the culture, behavior and ultimately the very existence of the oppressed and marginalized as an ontologically dangerous and adversarial social contagion to the mainstream.

As such, launching tirades against racism while aiming at the latrines of ‘liberal-democratic’ tolerance, aside from pissing away invaluable emancipatory momentum from confrontations against the bulwarks of Empire; merely reinforces the normative gaze of western imperialist power by not calling into question the biopolitical frontier of structural-inert violence which inscribes modernity. “Racism has to become a practice: it is not contemplation awakening the significations engraved on things; it is in itself self-justifying violence: violence presenting itself as induced violence, counter-violence and legitimate defense.” [2] Indeed, the pragmatic urgency and social necessity invoked in cultivating the widening spectrum of tolerance, effectively veils the geohistorical coherence of coloniality in the Raw.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, (Grove Press, 1956, 1967) p.32.

[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (Verso, 1960, 1991) p.720.