Race lets citizens benefit from state racism while disclaiming personal responsibility
Evidence
The racial state accordingly is as much a state or condition of being as it is a state of governance. Actually, it is more accurate to speak of racial states, for the forms and manifest expressions are multiple and multiplicitous, diverse and diffuse. Racial states are places among others where states of being and states of governance meet. For instance, race has long enabled citizens both to deny the state’s implication in violence and, where acknowledged, to deny any personal implication or to abrogate responsibility. Citizens of racial states thus are able to trade on the ambiguity between condition of being and form of governance, at once benefiting from (the historical and contemporary effects of) reproducing racisms and distancing themselves from any implication in them. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1660
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Introduces the core concept of ‘racial state’ as both a condition of being and a mode of governance, a two-facedness citizens exploit.
Related
- Racial states are conditions of being as well as governance structures. (similarity 0.85)
- Racelessness reassigns responsibility for racial outcome from state structures to individuals (similarity 0.83)
- Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence (similarity 0.82)
- Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power (similarity 0.81)
- Racelessness still leaves citizens racially self-endowed through state media. (similarity 0.81)
- Racial historicism makes racial structures invisible and absolves individuals of responsibility for them (similarity 0.81)
- Race both drives and expresses violence, property, profit, and power (similarity 0.80)
- Race consciousness can serve either democratic or despotic ends. (similarity 0.80)
- Racism emerges where race discourse meets the state (similarity 0.80)
- Modern racial states are constituted through the legal fashioning of racial categories (similarity 0.79)
- Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state, not incidental to it. (similarity 0.79)
- Race itself is not a rationalization but the embodiment of power relations. (similarity 0.79)
- A racially conceived state can only express itself in racial terms (similarity 0.79)
- The racial state is normal, not exceptional, to modernity (similarity 0.79)
- States are racial by population-structuring but racist only when that structuring excludes (similarity 0.79)