Profiled suspects enter legal spaces stripped of law’s protections

Evidence

What remains significant about the contemporary racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, however, is not this well-established history but the fact that anti-Muslim racism now operates in a culture of exception, where to be profiled as a terrorist is to have a high chance of being taken to a place of law without law. Those who are profiled soon find themselves on lists, under surveillance and under suspicion, and in detention – states from which they cannot easily emerge. Diken and Lausten suggest that if ‘power is to be total, it must defy regularity and rationality.’ Power must become terror, arbitrary and unpredictable. If, in the security-certificate hearings discussed below, we do not yet glimpse the full outlines of a regime of terror, we can see the arbitrary character of the law whereby stereotypes hold sway and arguments, in the absence of evidence of wrong-doing, rests primarily on the idea that they are not like us and they will pose a threat to us. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 91

Categorization

• XREF: Shapiro’s ‘places of law without law’; ‘culture of exception’ resonates with Agamben’s state of exception which the reader has encountered in security and law scholarship.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from documented historical prejudice to the structural point about law’s arbitrariness serving as the threshold to terror is a genuinely dense, paradigm-level observation about how profiling escalates to lawlessness.