Hale constructs racism as a set of social, economic, and political techniques--segregation, disenfranchisement, media production, &c.--that create spaces in which whites can attempt to find comfort. Racism attempts to minimize the threat of the advancing, modernizing other, which is why the well-dressed, well-off black repeatedly appears as the arch-enemy of southern white segregationists; that intolerable affront to whiteness had to be prevented through the control of access to technology.
This view of racism fits perfectly with the idea of racism as biological warfare. There seems to be a deep anxiety within the segregationist South of being out-competed by the other; fears of the formation of a successful black middle-class, the inhuman virility and lust of the black man as “black beast rapist,” and the threat of racial mixing and the subsequent invisibility of blackness, can all be read in biological terms as fears of the loss of the hereditary “superiority” of whiteness: to retain competitiveness, “the other must die” (Foucault 255)
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So in the transition from the bare social utility of black slavery to the biopolitical arena of race opened by emancipation, Hale's racism seems to emerge as a technology to hold back the specter of white degeneracy. If this specter is around today (I would argue that it is), is it primary in our biopolitics? Do white racial fears of an overwhelming alterity stem from a perceived loss of biological or cultural virility? How does this change the way we must deal with race?
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