Race functions as the political theology of modernity, licensing institutional violence

Evidence

Race, in short, becomes par excellence the political theology of and for modernity, as I argued in the exemplifying case of apartheid South Africa in the previous chapter. And in so doing, it licenses institutional violence that seeps into and across the key apparatuses of the state while directing both the shape and content of social subjectivity. Race, in brief, lights the fuel sparking what Achille Mbembe provocatively calls the “spirit of violence.” It accordingly sustains systematic social conditions of exclusion, and the varieties of more or less visceral violence underscoring and extending them. It turns a blind eye to, when not encouraging, state-tolerated individual violence, silently licensing individuals to do the work with which the state should not be associated. Since Silvio Berlusconi’s re-election, residents of Naples, materializing the polled preferences of more than two out of three Italians to expel Roma from the country, have taken to burning down Roma residential camps in the city, with little if any official resistance. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1826

Categorization

• XREF: The Naples Roma-camp burnings resonate with A Very Minor Prophet’s theme of urban poverty and structural indifference, and with the state-tolerated vigilantism in white-supremacist lynchings. — connects to: Race remains a routine, current shaper of modern state violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1843; Race replaced religion as modernity’s dominant public organizing frame — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 54; Race both drives and expresses violence, property, profit, and power — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 71
• ADDENDUM: The licensed violence that ‘the state should not be associated with’ parallels the routine state-tolerated brutality discussed in the sacrifice piece about how ritualized violence stabilizes social orders.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1826