Racism is a technology that legitimizes state killing under biopower.

Evidence

That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.” In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.” — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 39

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines racism’s function within biopower as the regulatory technology that makes state killing acceptable.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s scaffolding toolkit: biopower, biopolitics, the construction of the ‘Other,’ and Foucault’s lecture corpus. — connects to: State anti-racism language can become a bargaining chip for co-opting minorities into security policy. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 491; A future crisis could reactivate racist state social-engineering capacities. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 230; Soviet State racism turned the class enemy into a biological threat — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 100 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing later: how does Mbembe extend Foucault and Arendt here versus deviate from them in later chapters (necropolitics proper)?
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — the sovereign right of death is the state form of what ritual sacrifice does in small polities.

Related

• State racism frames killing others as purifying one’s own race (similarity 0.79)
• Race becomes the terrain where states wage a politics of life and death. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Soviet State racism turned the class enemy into a biological threat #exemplifies (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 100
• A future crisis could reactivate racist state social-engineering capacities. #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 230
• Racism functions as practices that ascribe and legitimate social positions #expands (0.80)
• Semantic and philosophical redefinitions are being weaponized to legitimate state violence. #expands (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 122