The racial state operates through invisible everyday osmotic penetration, not just visible force.

Evidence

In states that are racially conceived, ordered, administered, and regulated, the racial state could be said to be everywhere - and simultaneously seen nowhere. It (more or less invisibly) defines almost every relation, shapes all but every interaction, contours virtually all intercourse. It fashions not just the said and the sayable, the done and doable, possibilities and impermissibilities, but penetrates equally the scope and quality, content and character, of social silences and presumptions. The state in its racial reach and expression is thus at once supervisible in form and force and thoroughly invisible in its osmotic infusion into the everyday (Essed, 1990), its penetration into common sense, its pervasion (not to mention perversion) of the warp and weave of the social fabric. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1658

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines the racial state’s distinctive mode of operation: supervisible form, invisible everyday infusion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The supervisible/invisible-in-everyday paradox of state power is richly layered and worth sitting with.
• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s capillary power and Gramscian hegemony; resonates with the reader’s material on silence/ambient influence in The Soundscape.

Related

• A racial state is simultaneously all-encompassing and invisible in its effects (similarity 0.88)
• Deep state penetration makes race’s operation in governing relatively invisible (similarity 0.84)
• Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power (similarity 0.80)
• Racial states are conditions of being as well as governance structures. (similarity 0.80)
• The deeper race penetrates state bureaucracy, the more invisible it becomes (similarity 0.80)
• The racial state is normal, not exceptional, to modernity (similarity 0.80)