On Power and Violence

By comparing Hale and Foucault's texts, I would like to discuss about power, its social and political praxes, in terms of social, economic discourses, and judiciality. Power originates from temporality, persons, subjectivity, and institutions. Historically, America, and its south, explicates a power found in whiteness, specifically a possessive investment in whiteness via white supremacy, segregation, anti-black and anti-color racism, etc. This power, however, has transformed in the context of American (white) democracy wherein violence predicates order (e.g. lynchings justify the maintenance of order, of democracy, of whitehood). In this context, what is the legitimacy of democracy, other than its inability to protect Black bodies? Foucault’s ideas of citizenhood in society, “sovereignty”, help to explain why the white majority is interested in whiteness, creating varying power relations as a result of racism. If whites invest in such a democracy, in which a white interest dominates political as well as social and economic (market and labor) arenas, then non-whites, especially those forcibly brought over to America because of conquest and colonialization, are socio-economically circumscribed. In this vein, consequences of ideological violence are the sort of publicized violence in lynchings and segregation in the south. Also, how does a society decide existential questions of life and death? How does a society define those terms? And on what terms can these questions be answered?