Racial threat operates through distance and incapacitation, not engagement with its objects.

Evidence

All three racial prompts have encouraged, exacerbated, and extended vulnerability, aggression, and violence. But without belittling the suffering prompted by curiosity and exploitability, the aggravations with which they can be identified tend to be mediated by the fact that they each necessitate an engagement – more or less direct interaction – with their objectified subjects. Threat, by contrast, largely does not; in fact, those deemed threatening are held at a distance, whether physically or emotionally, psychologically or politically. Threat undercuts the possibility of such mediation, delimiting engagement to the violence of incarceration or the instrumentalities of incapacitation. In short, threat for the most part seeks distantiation of one sort or another, not engagement, whether spatially or symbolically, materially or rhetorically enacted. But the other side of threat entails also that the group – the “population” – seen as threatening is the one actually threatened: with alienation, intimidation, incarceration, marginalization and externalization of one kind or another, ultimately even with extinction. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 152

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes threat from other racial prompts (curiosity, exploitability) by its defining feature: distantiation rather than engagement.
• XREF: connects to: Threat-based racial governance relies on distance and incapacitation, not engagement with its targets — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 152