Presumed knowledge of others fabricated by race enables exploitation and violence

Evidence

But familiarity, the idiom would have it, similarly breeds contempt. Contempt in this case, we might ask, for whom? And to what end(s)? For those thrown together with one in some way by circumstance – by the very demands of social constitution, if I am right – and whom one accordingly presumes to know, in character and habit, condition and behavior, prospect and limit. In short, ethnoracially. It is the presumption of knowledge, the fabrication of character for those one knows at best partially, in both senses of the term, which both bears and bares the stigma of race in these instances. The end(s), of course, are varied – exploitation or extermination, use and abuse, assertion and order. In short, violence and property, profit, and power, instrumentally but also for their own sakes. Race feeds, fuels, and funnels violence, property, profit, and power, but can also be their modes of expression, the forms in which they manifest. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 71

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing turn — race as both the fuel feeding violence/property/profit/power and simultaneously their mode of expression — is a dense, recursive formulation worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Therapeutic knowledge has become the humiliation of others by privilege; Presumed racial knowledge fabricates character and bears race’s stigma — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 71; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them” (+1 more)