Colonial race thinking ordered both the globe and the nation’s internal hierarchy.

Evidence

If Europe laid claim to humanity, Gilroy notes, that humanity ‘could exist only in the neatly bounded, territorial units where true and authentic culture could take root under the unsentimental eye of a ruthlessly eugenic government.’ If the nation existed within the higher logic of a natural hierarchy, that logic also ordered those within the nation itself. Extending Foucault’s argument that racism was the ordering principle establishing who shall live and who shall die, Gilroy suggests that at the summit of imperial power, race thinking and race science combined with nationalism to invest the nation with characteristics associated with biocultural kinship in which new forms of duty and mutual obligation appeared to regulate relationships between members of the collective, while those who fell beyond the boundaries of the official community were despised, reviled, and subjected to entirely different political and juridical procedures, especially if they did not benefit from the protection of an equivalent political body. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and the distinction between bare life and political life.