The Racial State after Ferguson

• In Event: 326 - Regular Session. National Perspectives on Racism and Anti-Racism

Abstract

Contemporary US racial conditions have now crystallized around the meme "Ferguson." Police racism and police impunity are important subjects in their own right, but there are bigger forces at work here, larger questions to ask. These involve racial politics in the US as the Obama presidency draws toward its close, as the ideology of "colorblindness" is consolidated amidst an apparently permanent racial regime of mass incarceration and anti-immigrant nativism, and as the dominant economic project of neoliberalism advances toward its goal of eviscerating what remains of the US welfare state. A new framework of anti-racist mobilization is emerging to confront these conditions; this also must be evaluated. Seen in the context of these trends, police violence appears less aberrant, less volatile. "Law enforcement" is not well understood here, a la Max Weber, as "the monopoly of legitimate violence," since its legitimacy is in serious question. It is rather the regular stuff of racial rule, better understood as menacing black and brown communities, and not only grudgingly accepted but actively welcomed in many white ones. This paper examines racial rule and anti-racist opposition to it in the contemporary US, focusing on the following topics; Race and the Rule of Law; A Police State?; Anti-Racist Movement Politics; Race and NeoLiberalism; and The Obama Presidency-Too Little, Too Late.

Author

• Howard Winant, University of California-Santa Barbara