Bureaucratic framing makes racial evictions look like routine legal process

Evidence

Race thinking, in particular the melding of race and bureaucracy, render these evictions invisible or as instances of mere fidelity to the rule of law and a legitimate defence of civilization in response to the threat from those who do not share its values. We imagine that people are ‘security risks,’ not persons who ‘disappear,’ who are simply deported. Through appeal to the idea of a clash of civilizations, evictions become defensible. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 400

Categorization

• XREF: The melding of race and bureaucracy echoes the reader’s notes on Weberian rational administration and how neutral procedure launders political choices.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that race thinking becomes invisible precisely by merging with bureaucracy — that the exclusion is accomplished not despite but through the appearance of neutral rule-following — is a dense, reusable mechanism worth sitting with.