The racial state operates through internalized identity, not just formal institutions

Evidence

The racial state does not have precise boundaries. Although based in formally constituted institutions and grounded ina contentious historical process, the state extends beyond administrative, legislative, or judicial forms of activity. It inhabits and indeed organizes large segments of social and indeed psychological identity, as well as everyday life. Internalizing and “living out” a particular racial identity, for example, is in some ways internalizing the state; poststructuralist theorists might describe this in terms of “governmentality” (Foucault 1991, 1997). From a Freudian point of view, we might understand the racial state in terms of “{ntrojection”: another form of internalization in which rules and constraints become mechanisms of psychological selfdefense. Still another way in which the racial state casts its net over our identities, our everyday experiences, is through the process Althusser called “interpellation”: the way expansion of the rights that abolition implied: the achievement by all of complete democracy and full citizenship (Du Bois 2007 186; see also Lipsitz 2004; Davis 2005, 73-74). — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 141

Categorization

• XREF: Governmentality, introjection, interpellation — connects to Foucault and Althusser reading from earlier and to critical theories elsewhere. — connects to: Racial states are conditions of being as well as governance structures. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1660; The racial state is instrumental in forming subjects and their bodies — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1707