Racialized regimes license privatized citizen violence against targeted groups.

Evidence

Race, in short, becomes par excellence the political theology of and for modernity, as I argued in the exemplifying case of apartheid South Africa in the previous chapter. And in so doing, it licenses institutional violence that seeps into and across the key apparatuses of the state while directing both the shape and content of social subjectivity. Race, in brief, lights the fuel sparking what Achille Mbembe provocatively calls the “spirit of violence.” It accordingly sustains systematic social conditions of exclusion, and the varieties of more or less visceral violence underscoring and extending them. It turns a blind eye to, when not encouraging, state-tolerated individual violence, silently licensing individuals to do the work with which the state should not be associated. Since Silvio Berlusconi’s re-election, residents of Naples, materializing the polled preferences of more than two out of three Italians to expel Roma from the country, have taken to burning down Roma residential camps in the city, with little if any official resistance. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1826

Categorization

• XREF: Burning of Roma camps echoes the reader’s threatened-privilege test — majority Italians polling to expel Roma resemble zero-sum ethnic threat mobilization elsewhere. — connects to: Sacralized racial hierarchy licenses unlimited violence against the demonized. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1559; States authorize violence against people cast outside the political community — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 399; Violence legitimated by religious claims is a racialized governing technology. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 137 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the sacrifice essay: race as political theology invoking sacrificial distinctions between wanted and unwanted.
• QUESTION: Is the Roma expulsion preference a case of threatened-privilege mobilization generalizing beyond race, or a distinct nativist dynamic?

Broader Connections

• States authorize violence against people cast outside the political community #corroborates (0.88) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 399