Racism is best understood as the promotion of premature death
Evidence
Racism, she notes, is the likely promotion of the premature death of those individuals and groups subjected to the debilitating terms and conditions of racist configurations and exclusions. There is something unsettlingly significant in her insight: racism both involves the increased probability of premature death for those who are the victims of its violence and foreshortens the lives of those who, but for its institutionalized pressures and effects, for its mark(s), would very likely (inevitably?) live better, longer, more productive, less fraught lives. The death at issue may be physical or social, and where social it renders those suffering it significantly more vulnerable to physical death too. … Racism of course includes delimbing, whipping, hanging, beating, bombing, shooting or gassing. But it is also targeted or collateral malnutrition (a lack of food and bad food), stress formation, physical debilitation, humiliation, and degradation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 141
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader death-infrastructure theme I’ve been tracking across the sacrifice and silence work — premature death as a structural product rather than an event. Also resonates with the ‘wounds that kill you over time’ register in Deep Listening. — connects to: Racism operates as a disposition toward premature death of the subjugated. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 141; Bombing and sanctions constitute racialized vulnerability to premature death — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 87; A racist logic marked Iraqis as vulnerable to premature death — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 197 (+1 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The compression of racism into a relation to death — physical and social death as one continuum — is genuinely paradigm-shifting in how it unifies micro and macro, and resists any one-sentence summary.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 141