Civility veils rather than ends sanctioned state violence

Evidence

Civility as historical process accordingly is not the purging – ending – of violence but its veiling (the iron hand in the velvet glove), the positioning of socially sanctioned violence out of sight – behind walls (e.g., execution, torture, harassment, sweat shops) or “over there” (colonization, foreign wars, desperately cheap factories, in occupied territories), placing curtains between public and private violence, between publics and violence in their name. Civility, in short, becomes a – the – mode for monopolizing the means of public violence while expressing disinterest in it. As such, it is a principal (and sometimes nominally principled) process for establishing and sustaining modern state domination in the Weberian sense of monopolizing the forms and conditions of expression of legitimate(d) violence and force. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines civility as the veiling of sanctioned violence, not its elimination — reframing a word traditionally associated with refinement and peace.
• SEED: Essay angle: civility talk in public discourse as a mask for sanctioned violence — the current ‘civility’ rhetoric mapped onto state execution, foreign wars, sweatshops.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 250
• XREF: connects to: State-sponsored violence channels a resentful hatred of living bodies; The civilizing state embodies the very violence it claims to purge. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 238; American Orientalism justifies therapeutic violence against Arabs as civilizing mission — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 235 (+4 more)