Power and Consumption

Foucault calls racism “a war between races.” The word “war” does not readily come to my mind when I read about the numerous mechanisms of asserting or reinforcing the white supremacy in Hale’s Making Whiteness. As Foucault points out, the notion of war has been eliminated here because the United States as a nation is not supposed to have internal wars. Segregation, lynching and other forms of oppressive practices, at their time, were believed by the whites as to be the order that should be defended. Foucault reveals the fundamental paradox at the center of the Enlightenment theory of sovereignty – if one signs the social contract in order to survive, how can the sovereignty possess the right to take one’s life? The power of letting live only bases itself on the power of killing. Is this the reason why a nation must be able to kill and to justify its killing? In Hale’s book we can identify both the power techniques described by Foucault: on the one hand there is the emphatic demarcation of the black as a race that is conceptualized as biologically different from the whites; on the other hand the book lists countless instances in which institutions and individuals act as the agents of the power that asserts white supremacy. Interestingly though, Hale seems to suggest that the rise of consumerist society does not just create new racist practices; it also makes it possible for African Americans to enjoy higher quality of living through the essentially equal identity of consumer. It’d be interesting to talk about how power as Foucault understands it functions through consumption.