State violence against racialized populations recurs across centuries and continents

Evidence

The numbers are notorious, almost numbing. Ten million enslaved Africans perished in Middle Passage, on reasonable estimates. Death en passant to a life more often than not worse than death. Starved, worked, beaten, suffocated, diseased to death. Numbers as large again prematurely killed in new world slavery. Systemically, brutally worked, beaten, saddened or maddened into death. Seven million aboriginal inhabitants of Australia wiped out by European colonization and modernization. A lynching every other day in the southern states of the US throughout the 1890s. Ten million battered into death by Leopold’s vicious regime in the Congo between 1885 and 1908, half of the population of the area castrated and delimbed and diseased in a brutality matched only by the six million Jews and nameless others gassed and shot and tortured to death by Aryan superiority in the 1940s, for which the Congolese experience served as a pre-cursive laboratory. Each death exceptional in transnational processes of violence and violation all too sadly not. One million people murdered in 1994 in Rwanda in the ethnoracial name of not belonging. In one month. More than 70 percent of the more than two million people rotting in US prisons (up from 200,000 less than 40 years ago) people of color. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 22

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Congolese colonial violence ‘served as a pre-cursive laboratory’ for the Holocaust is a strong historical-connection argument worth checking against the historiography.
• XREF: The recurrence-of-racial-violence nexus parallels the Frankfurt School work on authoritarianism and state violence as systemic rather than episodic. — connects to: Racialized mass violence recurs transnationally, from slavery through apartheid to mass incarceration; Legally sanctioned state violence against subordinate groups is widespread globally — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3198; Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1741 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Racialized mass violence recurs transnationally, from slavery through apartheid to mass incarceration #corroborates (0.95)
• Legally sanctioned state violence against subordinate groups is widespread globally #corroborates (0.92) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3198
• Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power #expands (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1741
• Race remains a routine, current shaper of modern state violence #expands (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1843
• Colonial and racial violence has claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide #expands (0.85)
• Race is constitutive of the modern nation-state from its emergence #expands (0.82)
• States enabling racial exclusion are violent even without direct enforcement #expands (0.80)
• Racialized unruly populations become targets of states of exception #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1750
• Gender shapes how Muslim racialization manifests in violence and state scrutiny #exemplifies (0.75)