Racism’s first function is to fragment the population into biological subspecies.

Evidence

This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 8308

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes racism as a biopolitical mechanism of subdivision, not mere prejudice — core to the theoretical toolkit.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia reading goal — racism as population-fracturing technique connects to how Muslim populations get constructed as categories.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 8308