Racism operates as production of group vulnerability to 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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In a terse twist, by the same token, death’s distillation, its concentration, the recognition of death’s enormity in these cases conjures racial evaporation. In the case of slavery racial evaporation transpires in the delinking of past from present and future, The concentrated killing of Auschwitz evaporates race in the insistence of the Shoah’s uniqueness, its exemplary exceptionality. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 848 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racism operates as a disposition toward premature death of the subjugated. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 141; Unruly populations defined through racial extension face necropolitical discipline — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1750; Any group defined as a racial object finds its identity mediated through death — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1837 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Racism is best understood as the promotion of premature death #corroborates (0.98) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 141
• Acknowledging death’s enormity can itself erase the racial dimension #complicates (0.73) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 848