Racism determines both who becomes a prisoner and what they become

Evidence

If it seems obvious that Abu Ghraib is a camp, a place where the rule of law no longer applies and where, as Agamben observed, nothing committed against the camp’s inmates can be considered a crime, it is nevertheless important to examine closely the ‘normalcy of exceptional brutality’ that Gordon and others associate with both the military prison and the prison industrial complex. As Arendt noted of the Nazi concentration camps, brutality was not simply born of guards who were unusually sadistic or resentful of prisoners who had once been their social superiors. Instead, ‘the old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely.’ Systematic destruction and systematic abandonment of surplus or unwanted populations is productive. When we come face to face with utterly normalized practices of terror, practices that turn prisoners into homo sacer, the being who may be killed not sacrificed, it is here that we see the logic of the exception as it is under-girded by race thinking. Racism, Gordon insightfully notes, determines not only who becomes a prisoner but also what the prisoner becomes – ‘an inferior race in and of themselves.’ By the same token, the guards, and all those who are drawn to participate in their practices, become the superior race. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the book’s core claims that race gives content to threat categories and that categorical dehumanization is the elementary act of sovereign power.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 146