Jeffersonian Trembling: White Nationalism and the Racial Origins of National Security (original) (raw)
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The Origin of US Racial Imperialism : The White "Civilizing" State against the Red "Savages"
This paper analyzes how the Euro-American efforts to assimilate or eliminate the racial Other contributed to the construction of U.S. foreign policy and modern international hierarchy. I will argue that processes of imperial encounters generated the anti-East Coast elite, an anti-intellectual ethos among Euro-American frontier masses that formed an aspect of the American identity: the white “civilizing” forces against red “barbarian” natives. This American Self led to the creation of popular racial imperialism in U.S. security imaginary. The present research engages with two international relations theories: constructivism and the English School. On the one hand, this paper is an empirical study of “first contacts” to understand how self-regarding ideas about security developed. The incorporation of the U.S. frontier into the international framework opens an historical enquiry into the way the Hobbesian culture was constituted through early modern intercivilizational encounters, and how an imperial “hierarchy” rather than an international anarchy was established. On the other hand, my study resonates with those revisionists who criticize Eurocentrism in the English School’s problematic of the “expansion of the international society” that inadequately presupposes the priority of the Westphalian interstate order and ignores the dark side of the narrative of expansion.
Burning in the Melting Pot: American Policing and the Internal Colonization of African Americans
Rutgers Race & The Law Review, 2021
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis Police Department officer. During Floyd’s arrest by Chauvin and three other officers, Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. During this time, Floyd said more than 20 times that he couldn’t breathe as he cried in pain, begging for his mother. Less than two days later, racial justice protests erupted in 2,000 cities across all 50 states as more than seven million people took to the streets demanding an end to police brutality and racial injustice towards African Americans. Despite the protests being overwhelmingly peaceful, brutality against protestors by federal, state, and local law enforcement was rampant. Videos emerged of police assaulting peaceful protesters and kettling groups of racial justice advocates. Federal agents aimed crowd-control weapons at protestors’ heads, beat street medics applying aid to protestors, and dragged protestors off the street into unmarked vehicles. As I watched agents of the State murder George Floyd and saw countless acts of police brutality against peaceful police brutality protestors on a nationwide scale, I read the names of recent Black victims of police brutality: Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Aura Rosser, Michelle Cusseaux, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, and many others. All of these victims were individuals with hopes, fears, aspirations—all of which had their lives taken by those tasked with protecting and serving Black communities. While these killings were tragic, their deaths cannot be attributed solely to a few “bad apples” as unfortunate, isolated events. Rather, their deaths—and contemporary racial inequality—are ultimately a consequence of enduring historical processes and structures of colonial domination that have persisted since our nation’s founding. While the particular appearance of colonial control may have transformed over time, the logics of colonialism—containment, erasure, terror, and removal—persist in one form or another, with policing acting as the primary institution through which colonial logics are implemented, managed, and perpetuated. America’s modern policing institution was formed in the early 20th century and shaped by the imperial-military regime that governed America’s colonized territories overseas. While modern policing was rooted in colonial notions of Black criminality and biological inferiority, racialized policing and systemic discrimination isolated African Americans into “internal colonies”: isolated, economically-deprived urban neighborhoods. As time progressed, police occupation and domination of Black internal colonies were given different justifications, such as “law and order” or anti-narcotics initiatives, while simultaneously maintaining the same colonialist machinations and structures that white American society insists were abolished long ago. Within this note, I will argue that contemporary American policing, and its relation to racial inequality is merely the newest chapter in a generational process in which the police constitute the front line of a race- and class-stratified social order. First, I will discuss the colonial origins of American policing practices, which are rooted in American empire, and the domination and control of colonized territories. Additionally, I will discuss how operational and structural reforms such as intelligence-gathering and counterinsurgency helped the military to surveil and control colonized populations. Then I will discuss how “imperial feedback” permitted the operations of empire abroad to shape the operations of domestic policing. I will explore how colonial control practices and radicalized homologies were adopted by police, and counterinsurgency and intelligence strategies became standard practice for law enforcement. Second, I will discuss the Great Migration of Black Migrants from the Jim Crow South and how the “Promised Land” of Northern cities proved to be another form of racial enclosure. I will discuss the social, cultural, and economic developments that spurred racial animosity towards Black migrants. Then I will briefly discuss how racial animosity or “whitelash” manifested through segregative policies and the social construction of Black criminality. Third, I will discuss how, from the 1910s to the 1970s, reform era policing practices acted as a conduit for white racial animosity and how police viewed themselves as essential in controlling and suppressing the perceived threat associated with racial and ethnic minorities. Finally, I will discuss how the social construct of Black criminality shaped the strategies of police departments in urban areas. Fourth, I will discuss the origins and history of the war on drugs. I will discuss the radicalized origins of “law and order” rhetoric and how social welfare became replaced by further police militarization under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. I will explore how Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidents’ war on drugs aggravated the militarization of American police and laid the foundation for a racially disparate and discriminatory system of mass incarceration. Finally, I will discuss the consequences and costs of the war on drugs regarding criminal justice and the impact the war on drugs has had on Black communities. Fifth, I will explain the nature of colonialism and how internal colonialism allows colonialist structures to persist throughout history. My explanation will include a summary of the dynamics of colonial domination and how colonizer “myths” allow colonial domination to endure through white dissonance and dissociation from historical atrocities. Finally, I will apply the concept of internal colonialism to the “urban ghetto.” I will explore how colonial ideologies and practices helped isolate Black Americans in economically disadvantaged areas. I will explore how these same colonial structures have endured in modernity and perpetuate racial inequality and the subordination of the internally colonized Black population.
HOMELAND (IN)SECURITY: A RACIAL HOUSE CALLED AMERICA.pdf
Anglo Saxonica Journal Serie III Nº 14, 2017
In this essay we propose a reflection on the meaning of “homeland” and “home” for individuals and groups, citizens of a second order, who are profiled as “alien”, “undesirable” and “disposable” in the U. S. We argue that the post 9/11 rhetoric and policy of surveillance and security is not new to American history; they just expose and magnify the longstanding roots in colonialism and capitalist exploitation of an Anglo-Saxonist sense of racial superiority and white privilege. Blacks, browns, as well as undesirable immigrants have been marked by color or “illegality” and pressed into poverty and destitution. In the current political circumstances, not exclusively in the U. S., they are the most vulnerable victims of a system of economic liberalism which resorts to racial profiling, police militarization, and massive incarceration. One of the most evident consequences is the fact that prisons, mostly private ones, are predominantly filled by individuals belonging to these groups. We conclude that public resistance, social networks, and intersectional/transnational solidarity may oppose these threats to the best principles of democracy. KEYWORDS Home; Homeland security; Racial profiling; Immigration; Mass incarceration.
SSRN Electronic Journal
of transformation. Her analysis focuses attention on the dynamics of securitising moves and acts. Her concern is to figure out (to return to the distinction between security as a state of being and securitisation as a social and political practice) under what conditions the latter practice might contribute torather than erodethe former state of being. This is a liberal project of constraining state power, or seeking principles to ground its use or extension, of setting useable criteria for having less of something deemed necessary but harmful. The supportive references to Lucia Zedner's work on security, and with Andrew Ashworth on principles of preventive justice, underscore the point (p. 46). 35 But does the justifiability of securitisation, and our resources constraining it, not also depend on the institutions and practices of politicisation, a category that is almost entirely overlooked in this book? My concern here is not with desecuritisation as the supplement of securitisation (p. 178), nor with the question of what happens when securitisation is terminated. Rather, I want to emphasise the properties that 'normal politics' has, or might require, to resist the pull of securitisation in the first place. It is commonly remarked of moral panics that they are surface phenomena, animated by group conflict and status competition, and connected to wider anxieties about transitions in social, economic, and moral order. 36 This is also arguably true of securitisations. They are not simply the outcome of existential threat and the exceptional measures needed to combat that threat. Their frequency and shape is also conditioned by prevailing status hierarchies and social exclusions (both national and global), and by the capacities of democratic politics to handle or alleviate the resulting tensions. If this is right, it demands attention not only to the moral limits one might place on securitisation. It also calls for a fuller exploration of the forms of democratic politics that conduce to security (as a state of being) and offer constraints on securitisation because of their capacity to govern risk and threat without resort to it. 37 To make this point is not to detract from Floyd's clear-minded efforts to supply normative grounds to limit securitising agendas. It is simply to highlight the path not takenone that takes us beyond the liberal project of principles-based constraint and towards an exploration of the kinds of transformative democratic politics that can foster and sustain security in ways that drain the reservoir of social anxiety, and affective support, that securitising actors mobilise and reproduce.
Fear of a Black President: Conspiracy Theory and Racial Paranoia in Obamerica
This essay interrogates the madness of racial discourse in Obamerica. Instead of signaling the beginning of post-racial America, Obama is further proof that America suffers from racial schizophrenia, a disorder defined by, “auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, [and] disorganized speech and thinking.” In the madness of Obama-mania, the U.S. prematurely declared victory over racism even when the demography of poverty, wealth, education, and incarceration denotes the continuation of a racialized caste system. Worsening material conditions for Black and poor people in Obamerica has coincided with state sanctioned racial profiling via New York City’s “Stop-and-Frisk” policies, while the killings of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Kimani Gray, Tamir Rice, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones have reignited concerns that it is open season on young, Black boys and girls.