Racial terror, not rational administration, has long secured colonial power

Evidence

Colonial regimes have long been structured by what, borrowing from Michael Taussig, we might more appropriately call racial terror. Taussig reminds us that we would be unwise to ignore the role of terror in securing power. Terror is ‘the mediator par excellence of colonial hegemony,’ Taussig notes, and ‘the space of death is one of the crucial spaces where Indian, African, and white gave birth to the New World.’ Terror is how we come to know and make known colonial power – how it gets written on our bodies. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 186 (#expands, via linked claim)

But as the eighteenth century progressed, racist sentiments were increasingly buttressed by colonial administrators who, driven by a desire to secure the loyalties of white residents of the colony, encouraged racial division and hierarchy through the complex of discriminatory laws that Raimond railed against. There was, such officials argued, inevitable solidarity between free people of color and the enslaved, and only by highlighting the difference between whites and people of African descent, whatever their legal status, could the hierarchies necessary for the survival of slavery be maintained. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 229 (#complicates, via linked claim)

At the same time as they were extended, these strategies were to become increasingly unnoticeable. Lord Cromer, who liked to describe colonial control as a process of continuous ‘tutoring’, envisaged the ideal colonial official in the form of an omnipotent yet silent school teacher: ‘he was to exercise supreme authority over his pupil, and at the same time … his authority was to be unfelt’. … This was because the new methods of creating the effect of frameworks or structures worked not only to hold and coordinate the individual subject’s physical body. They were also to work upon a non-physical interior, the individual mind. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 543 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racial terror is the fundamental mediator of colonial power — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 186; Colonial mass terror ran on cultural mythology, not mere economic rationality — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 189; White colonial authorities responded to the slave revolt with mass executions and terror — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 327 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial terror is the fundamental mediator of colonial power #expands (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 186
• Colonial administrators deliberately engineered racial hierarchy to secure white loyalty. #complicates (0.80) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 229
• Modern colonial power grows more effective the less it is noticed #complicates (0.78) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 543