Racialized youth violence can mark division within shared masculine culture

Evidence

In showing the operation of the fantasy of a superior West and an inferior non-West, as it is evident in the law and in arguments made by those supporting racist legal measures, I hope to underline that the only possible route out of the dilemma in which I find myself is to begin with racism itself, tracing the many ways in which it shuts down opportunity for meaningful anti-violence strategies. In sum, you can’t fight violence against women with racism because racism is likely to strengthen patriarchal currents in communities under siege. Through their exclusive emphasis on culture as the sole source of patriarchal violence, culturalist approaches obscure the multiple factors that give rise to and sustain the violence. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 255 (#complicates, via linked claim)

It is in the interest of confronting a ‘fascist poetics,’ and out of the need to move beyond the mythologies (of cultural difference) that so easily reconciles the West to the sexualized torture of Arabs and Muslims, that I have pursued an interlocking analysis of prisoner abuse. Drawing on scholarship on lynching, I have been advancing a theoretical framework that suggests how white masculinity is constituted simultaneously against warmth and sensuality as well as against desire for (oneness with) the racial other. … Culture has been the language of contemporary narratives of terror. Cultural difference, understood as their cannibalism, their treatment of women, and their homophobia, justifies the savagery that the West metes out. ‘The Christian in me says this is wrong,’ Charles Graner, one of the soldiers charged with abuse and the alleged ringleader, is reputed to have said, ‘but the corrections officer in me can’t help making a grown man piss himself.’ The West has appointed itself as the corrections officer to the non-West, and Charles Graner should not be understood as a man who has simply taken his duties too far. For what else is a civilized man to do in his encounter with savages but civilize them? — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 190 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racialized minorities in white communities may integrate but never congregate without provoking violence; Racial violence encodes disavowed homoerotic desire between white and black men; Sexual violence expresses a cultural ideology of male dominance — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 174 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Racist anti-violence strategies strengthen rather than weaken patriarchy in embattled communities #complicates (0.73) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 255
• Gender predicts out-group aggression but not in-group favoritism #complicates (0.72)
• White masculinity is constituted against and through desire for the racial other #complicates (0.71) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 190