Anomalous state violence hides in plain view and becomes routine institutional practice.

Evidence

The supposed anomaly of the counter-violence suggests also that it is more likely hidden, less visible to public scrutiny even when in plain view, and so less obviously troublesome. But insofar as less visible, less conscious across civil society, it is also likely to become more routinized, sewn into the institutional structures of state security and its logics of response, and so making possible even more violent interventions. Violence against the rogue in the name of exceptionality at once reveals the sovereign licensing the violence to be as rogue-riddled, as beastly, as the target. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1831

Categorization

• XREF: This inverts the moral-panic logic in the earlier ‘moral panic’ material — the hidden-seeming violence entrenches rather than dissolves institutions, unlike panic-backed sentencing.
• QUESTION: The claim that violence becomes more routinized precisely because it is hidden invites testing against visible counter-examples where overt violence radicalized publics instead.