Rights suspension under security ideology is masked as law rather than violence

Evidence

In the ‘war on terror,’ race thinking accustoms us to the idea that the suspension of rights is warranted in the interests of national security. Captured in the phrase ‘they are not like us,’ and also necessarily in the idea that ‘they’ must be killed so that ‘we’ can live, race thinking becomes embedded in law and bureaucracy so that the suspension of rights appears not as a violence but as the law itself. Violence against the racialized Other comes to be understood as necessary in order for civilization to flourish, something the state must do to preserve itself. Race thinking, Silverblatt reminds us in her study of the Spanish Inquisition, usually comes clothed in an ‘aura of rationality and civilization.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 39

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the framing in ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ about how ‘they are not like us’ logic operates, and connects to the reader’s library theme of securitized exclusion.