Systematized racial bias loses its character as prejudice and becomes routine state practice

Evidence

When race thinking unites with bureaucracy, when, in other words, it is systematized and attached to a project of accumulation, it loses its standing as a prejudice and becomes instead an organizing principle. In our time, one result is a securitized state in which it is possible to know that ‘the passenger who has ordered a special meal is a non-smoking Muslim in seat 3K’ and to arrange for that passenger’s eviction from the aircraft. Racial distinctions become so routinized that a racial hierarchy is maintained without requiring the component of individual actors who are personally hostile towards Muslims. Increasing numbers of people find themselves exiled from political community through bureaucratic processes in which each state official can claim, as did Adolf Eichmann about arranging the transport of Jews to Nazi Germany, that he was only doing his duty. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 39

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Eichmann’s ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt) and to the Kafka-esque bureaucratic exclusion themes one might compare with Milgrom’s account of institutions. — connects to: Routinized state practices naturalize racial limits, making them appear unalterable — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1708
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that racism can operate with zero individually hostile actors — a fully distributed, bureaucratic racial hierarchy — is a dense, paradigm-shifting point that resists one-sentence summary.