Camps produce white self-understanding as a superior, civil community.

Evidence

For many who observe the increasing numbers of ‘rightless’ people and the creation of camps, it is clear that those most often evicted from political community are racialized. I am particularly interested in how such evictions of racialized peoples make possible the production of white identities – as kin groups, families, nations. Materially and symbolically, camps help to create and sustain a racial and neoliberal order in which white people come to know themselves as a superior people, a community that must fortify itself against pre-modern racial Others who do not share its values, beliefs, practices, and level of civility. Such a racially homogeneous community is nevertheless one made up of subjects who imagine themselves as raceless individuals, consumers, and agents without defining links to community – in other words, as citizens who have the freedom to make their own choices. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 36

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to whiteness studies and to the claim that racism constructs the white subject as much as it degrades the racial Other.