This video is part one of two. In this episode we'll be exploring the work of Falguni Sheth
and learning about race, racialization, and political philosophy. In part two we'll look
at a case study and discuss the racialization of Muslims in so-called Western liberal societies.
We've got a lot of ground to cover today so I'm gonna jump right in. There's this big
debate over whether race is a series of biological categories or whether it's just a social construct.
And in her book "Toward a Political Philosophy of Race," Falguni Sheth tries to break away
from that binary. She says that to talk about race just as a biological category ignores all the ways
that it's used in politics and law, and to talk about it just as a social construct
ignores the more interesting questions of who constructs it, why they construct it, and how
they do it?
Sheth thinks that the concept of race is a type of technology: it's a mental tool
used by those in power: that's the who. They use it to manage
unruly populations: that's the why. And they do this through racialization: that's the
how. So let's get into it, and I'll explain to you what all of that means.
The technology of race is used by 'Sovereign Power,' that's a term that Sheth borrows from
from Foucault, and for the purposes of this video we can take it to mean, 'whoever is officially
in charge and the systems through which their power is expressed.'
Sheth talks specifically about liberal societies. By 'liberal societies' she means societies
with certain basic assumptions at their heart, for instance a division between the public
and the private spheres; an insistence that all citizens are equal; emphasis on the 'rule
of law,' where the law is thought to be fair and consented to democratically by the people.
Liberalism also usually means capitalism, and since the tail end of the 20th century
it's increasingly meant neoliberal capitalism, with an emphasis on low welfare, low taxes and free markets.
Sheth has a very interesting view of what Sovereign Power and its legal and political systems are for.
She thinks the purpose of the state is to conserve its own power, and, by extension, conserve those
basic liberal assumptions. The function of government is not to ensure peace, or justice, or fairness, or anything like that.
"This is the self-preservation society."
She thinks there's a paradox at the heart of liberalism. Liberal societies talk the
talk of inclusiveness and universal human rights for everyone, even as they systemically
exclude from that embrace certain groups of people. Think about how the founding fathers
of the US preached "Liberty and justice for all!" whilst owning slaves. It's not always
as stark as that but Sheth says that the promise of liberalism is very rarely realised for everyone.
But Sovereign Power has to preserve the basic liberal assumptions, so what does it do?
It creates exceptions. It rules out certain groups of
people as not being eligible for entrance into the Promised Land, as not being eligible
for protection, benefits, voting rights, whatever. As a bonus, if a population is enslaved, or
there's an unjust war, or a refugee crisis, or a financial crash, then those disasters
can be written off as mistakes. As misapplications of the principles of liberalism. Because Sovereign Power can always
say, " Oh, the exceptions that we made at the time looked legitimate but in hindsight they were actually errors."
Anything but systemic problems.
Ok, so we've said that the technology of race is used by Sovereign Power trying
to preserve itself. We've covered the 'Who?' But preserve itself against what exactly? Time to
look at the 'Why?'
Fortunately this bit's pretty easy. Sovereign Power wants to preserve itself against what Sheth calls 'the
unruly.' The unruly is that which is "unpredictable, undependable, or threatening to a political
order." Sovereign power doesn't make exceptions of people randomly. If your existence or the
way you live threatens any of the basic liberal assumptions, or even, as is often the case,
if it's just perceived as a threat to them, you're in danger of being marked as unruly. So for instance,
If you openly display your private values in public, if you remind people
that the law isn't always administered equally, if you actually need
the welfare state to survive, then in the eyes of Sovereign
Power you can be a threat, whether they're consciously aware of that and whether you actually are, or
not.
So Sovereign Power wants to preserve itself against perceived challenges from the unruly by making exceptions of people.
It's now time to bring race back into this, tie all the threads together, and talk about
how making those exceptions works.
Racialization is the process by which a population is divided, and one group is pushed further
and further away from that promise of liberalism, both in the law and in the minds of the people. It
is "the process of delineating a population in contrast to a dominant population and a
corresponding political tension." It's how Sovereign Power creates exceptions to its own
rules and makes those exceptions seem totally legitimate and natural.
Racialization protects sovereign power and suppresses the unruly because there's an implied
threat of violence for those who can't get into the Promised Land. If you're in the
group that racialized and pushed out, and you don't get the protection or the benefits or whatever it is, well that'd be bad for you wouldn't
it? So better stop being unruly and tow the line.
Let's say you and I represent sovereign power, and there's this group of people we think
are unruly and we want to racialize them. In order to do that we first need two things. They need to have
some distinguishing feature that we can use to point them out to the dominant population and say
"Look, there's the enemy." It could be a physical thing like skin colour but it might not: it
could be religion, socioeconomic status, gender, or their sexuality. If they don't
have a distinguishing feature then we could always try giving them one, like a yellow star. Or a red wristband.
They need to already be vulnerable already compared to the dominant population, otherwise it's going to very difficult for us to racialize and push them out. Maybe
there's some historical inequality that hasn't been rectified, maybe they're underrepresented
not represented in positions of power, maybe they're new immigrants to our nation and they need our help to survive.
We take their perceived unruliness and we say "Everybody with that
distinguishing feature is like that." And that's how we write them all off as bad, and begin to justify
excluding them from society as a race, a race that we have effectively just created.
Now, this is the hardest bit to understand. The distinguishing then become
the criteria by which sovereign power tells
us it's making the distinction. It's actually distinguishing on the basis of unruliness,
but it's disgusting that as a neutral, objective, possibly biological category. Think about
the lengths the Nazis went to to prove that Aryans were a different race from Jews, Poles,
whoever they wanted rid of at the time. Politics disguising itself as neutral, objective science.
Sheth thinks that physiological markers like skin colour or genetics don't constitute race.
Rather, those features
are used to point out populations that are already being racialised and pushed out because Sovereign Power perceives them as unruly.
That's why some biological differences like skin colour are thought to constitute
race, and some biological differences like hair and eye colour are just natural variation within a race: because the
rules for deploying the concept of race don't come from biology; they come from power.
All this theory might seem a bit abstract so let's look at a concrete example. Consider the internment of Japanese Americans
in the USA just prior to WWII. Many so-called Japanese Americans were actually American
citizens, 2nd or 3rd generation descendants of Japanese immigrants. They could be distinguished
on sight from the dominant white population. Their ancestors had faced obstacles like the Alien
Land Law and laws against mixed marriages, so compared to the white population they were already vulnerable.
When the war started the US government worried that they might rise up and commit mass sabotage.
That was the perceived unruliness. And so, on President Roosevelt's orders, 120,000 people
had their ordinary rights suspended and were imprisoned in concentration camps. The state took a bunch
of people who were in their eyes potentially unruly, drew a line around them, said "Everybody within that line is the same in terms of their threat
to us, regardless of how much individual evidence we may have for their cases,"and used that line as an excuse
to literally lock them up.
So to sum up, the concept of Race functions as technology in a threefold way: Firstly,
It classifies people according to their perceived unruliness
Secondly, It disguises that classification under criteria that are politically neutral, like skin colour
And finally, it hides the true relationship of violence between citizens and Sovereign Power
Sheth's model of race is neither biological category nor social construct: rather, race latches
onto certain observable variations in humans, sometimes biological sometimes not, and attaches
sociopolitical importance to them in order to preserve power.
And this might actually explain a lot: discriminating against someone because their skin is a different
colour - it's difficult to understand why anyone would do that. But discriminating against
someone because you've been told people like them are a threat? Suddenly that's a lot
easier to understand. And it might explain a few things too, like how young black men in the US
are much more likely to be thought threatening and therefore shot by the police than young white men. Race is more
than just a biological category: it's a socio-political one. It's worth noting that once racialization
becomes part of the law and the common discourse we can perpetuate it without even meaning to
or realising.
Sheth's work has the power to transform not only our understanding of race but our understanding of racism.
You might have heard people say, "I'm not racist because I don't hate anybody because of the colour of their skin."
Well now we know there's more to race than that we are better equipped to identify racist thinking in others and in ourselves.
I've had the misfortune of meeting a few racists in my time and they
won't tell you they hate people because of the colour of their skin: they'll tell you
that people "like that" are aggressive, or lazy, or rude, or whatever it is. You might
also have heard people say, "You can't be racist towards white people," and at first
glance that can look very odd, but if Sheth is right that race comes from power, given
that white people have historically held the balance of power, we can see that racism is
a more specialised and technical subset of discrimination. Obviously, if anyone were to just quote the
dictionary definition or the "common definition" of racism in order to refute that idea, they
would be begging the question against all of Sheth's work. You would need to actually
engage with her arguments, which leads me, finally, to this.
There are some final concerns to address before we finish part one. Firstly, does this erase
racial identity? Some people very proudly self-identify as members of a certain race;
if race is a tool of division and oppression created by the powerful then
aren't we taking that identity away from them? Sheth considers that and says no. Racial self-identity
follows after a population has already been racialized. The racialized population learns from Sovereign Power to
identify themselves as different from them. They are to be distinguished and we can have both.
Secondly, we've talked a lot about the failings of liberalism in this episode. Does that mean
liberalism as a project is doomed, that fairness and equality and justice can't be had?
Well, not necessarily. But what we need to realise is that the ideal of a liberal
society is one that we often fall short of. Fairness, democracy, equality - these might be worth striving
for. But we need to recognise not only where we fail to get them, but also where we
set ourselves up to fail.
Some people I'm sure will say Sheth is "redefining the word race" and "You can't just redefine words!".
Well hold your horses there because she's not just plucking a new definition out of
thin air so much as she is arguing that the old definition in the dictionaries and the common discourse actually leaves a lot of very important
things out. And if we wanted to critique Sheth's ideas, if you're writing an essay or a comment, then the
thing to do would be to ask, "Does her model of race explain how we see the concept
actually being used in the world, not just how the dictionary says we should see it being used? Does it make any
predictions about what we might observe, does it explain any of the things we observe? I've suggested some ways already in which it might. Is it useful? Remember though that it also
makes some predictions about whose evidence we are more likely to think is authoritative
in a society governed by Sovereign Power.
So what do you think of Sheth's work on race and power?
If you'd like a firmer grasp of how this theory translates into reality, then you can click on my face right now and head on over
to Part 2, where I'll be discussing the racialization of Muslims. There is a little bit more to racialization than I had time to
mention today, so if want to hear more about it you can pick up a copy of Professor Sheth's book.
Leave me a comment telling me what you thought, next time we could either look at John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty"
or we could discuss "What is Fate?" For more philosophical videos every Friday,
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