Race gives content to the category of threat that justifies suspending rule of law.

Evidence

Because suspensions of the rule of law turn on a logic that normative citizens must be protected from those who threaten the social order, a category to which race gives content, those who consider themselves ‘unmarked’ or original easily find them defensible. … Offering a contemporary example, Agamben writes of the 13 November 2001 American presidential decree that authorizes indefinite detention and hearing by military tribunal of non-citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activity. While aliens suspected of terrorist activity could be taken into custody under the Patriot Act, the 13 November presidential decree ‘radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 47

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and to the moral-panic material in later work on threats to social order.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘unmarked vs. marked’ dynamic in the Complaints About Immodesty article, where dress-policing marks out classes/identities as threats.