Racial logic now operates through coded, unspeakable terms

Evidence

It is a war, as a recently killed journalist pointed out, in which “we” nominally mourn the death of “our” soldiers killed in battle while thoroughly discounting, to the point of dismissing, the multiplied deaths of civilians (from) elsewhere as “collateral damage,” as the unfortunate cost of self-protection. This, in short, is the logic of a war of races turned loose, its terms of reference at the same time no longer speakable, but rather rendered implicit, coded. It is a war without limit, whether in the case of an expansive war on terrorism, a “coalitional” war against Iraq, or occupation of territories for security purposes. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 280

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the mourning-versus-collateral-damage asymmetry: links to current discourse about who counts as grievable (Butler’s Precarious Life territory).
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a war of races now runs with its terms ‘no longer speakable, but rendered implicit, coded’ — that racial logic survives precisely by evacuating its explicit vocabulary — is a dense, paradigm-level point.