Racialization enables genocide and genocide shapes racial constructions

Evidence

At first glance, an essay on genocide would seem to bear only a marginal relationship to racial and ethnic studies. After all, the gap between everyday acts of housing discrimination; race-based differentials in searches, prosecutions, sentencing, and access to health care; the appearance of denigrating media images, and the like are far removed from the Holocaust or the massive killings that have taken place recently in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and East Timor. This essay suggests that the relationship is well worth a second look. Genocide fundamentally informs racial constructions, their political effects, and the political contours and costs of efforts to resist them. Just as racialization and the production of other schemes of social difference play a key role in making such acts of mass and systematic killing possible, genocides constitute key sites in which the nature and limits of racialization and efforts to resist and punish it are constructed. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 250

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the everyday/genocide continuum — how mundane housing discrimination and mass killing share a single racialization logic, and why separating the two serves racial states.