(intro music) I'm Olufemi O. Taiwo. I'm a graduate student in philosophy at
UCLA, and today I'll be talking about race and the carceral state. We often use racial terms
like "white" and "black." Sometimes we mix these
terms with ones about ethnicity and geographic descriptions,
like nationalities. But ethnicity is primarily defined
by intergroup social definition, and nationality is defined by citizenship. And these don't always conform to the
visual classifications we might expect. Someone who's, for example, Latina could look like this or like this. And someone from Asia could
look like this or like this. We often use race to describe what someone looks like, and so you might think that race is something intrinsic
to a person's body or identity, since your body looks
the same everywhere. But actually, it's more complicated. For example, here we might identify this
person as some kind of exotic ethnicity, which isn't exactly race. But the same person in, say,
Brazil might be called "white." So we need a definition of race that accounts for how it travels,
as Ronke Oke describes it: how racial expectations
and conceptions change based on which social environment we're in. Falguni Sheth's explains race this way: as a technology that works as
a mode or vehicle of division, separation, hierarchy, as opposed to, say, a description of a set of
natural kinds to categories. What's important is that race isn't fundamentally about what
individual people are, but about what this identity
category does for a state or other managerial organization. Jason Stanley uses the
term "managerial state" to refer to a government where
things are organized around efficiency, defined and organized around
the interests and perspectives of the managers, or the people in charge. This is an important term in a world
globally organized around money, influenced by how markets
are regulated and constructed. The leaders of world governments aren't
always themselves businesspeople, but get lots of input in their
decision-making by various interests. One way by which the technologies
of race and incarceration manage is by way of the threat of
incarceration, policing, and criminalization of movement. All of these have disciplinary effects. Racist stigmas might
convince us to accept and perpetuate treatment of some
people of color as inherently criminal, most obvious in the American political context by the epithet "thug" for black
men, and the disproportionate labeling of migrants from Central and
South America as "illegals." This might prime us to accept
their mass incarceration, detention, and deportation
as unproblematic, while also priming those targeted
populations to view it as expected. Douglas Massey and Ta-Nehisi Coates have examined the ways in which now
hyper-policed communities were constructed geographically
by interlocking policies, particularly around housing and zoning. This concentrates poverty
and, as a result, crime which will then seem to justify the
disproportionate policing of those spaces. Loic Wacquant notes the ways in which impoverished communities and prisons
structurally inform each other, which has wide-reaching
social consequences. At least some of those
features seem to have been articulated clearly through artistic means, from the poetry of The
Watts Prophets in the 60s to the music of recent decades, like
Illmatic Illadelph Halflife, The New America
parts one and two, and Black Messiah. We can make two conclusions. One, the justifications for hyper-policing are sociologically circular. Two, if we have a problem with crime, we're probably not going to find
a solution anywhere in this circle. We can view this question
pessimistically or optimistically. If we're pessimists, there
might be nothing we can do. Maybe all we can end up doing is shifting around who is
included, who is excluded, and various ways of
parsing violent identities. But maybe there's reason for optimism. If we think we live in genuine democracy, then race might only function as a
technology if enough people are disposed to accept the marginalization of their fellow citizens on, ultimately,
racial grounds. Chris Lebron has noted that this crucially involves an issue of national character, or the kind of nation a
country would like to be. That is, this presents both a
challenge and an opportunity. Changing a nation's character
comes down to more than proving facts or winning
specific electoral battles. It comes down to motivating everyone to do
the tough work of restructuring systems. Subtitles by the Amara.org community