LITMIR.BIZ

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In other words, the dialectical underside of the modern security project—the insecurity it has always produced, particularly for populations in the formerly colonized world—is in the neoliberal context on uniquely stark display in both the global North and global South. The crisis today is not periodic, an anticipated trough in capital’s undulating patterns of regeneration, but perpetual.

      SECURITY AND RACE

      “The racial coding of the world,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Gilroy, emerged concomitant with the European conquest and settler-colonization of the Americas. Race discourse configured the state form and helped make available the subjection and exploitation of people within and beyond the boundaries of the political community. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the era in which Hobbes and Locke wrote, Europeans were waging war at home and abroad: enslaving and dominating peoples of Africa and the Americas, and prosecuting a race-inflected assault on the working poor—“the ‘savages’ of the civilized world”²⁰—domestically. Drawing the boundary between inside and outside at the same time it articulated the social body into opposed classes, race was central to the formation and securing of emergent property relations and methods of accumulation in both Old World and New.²¹

      The state arises to secure the civis, the space of law and reason, from the anarchy and infrahumanity of the state of nature. The distinction is a racial one. With the foundation of the state, the crisis of the state of nature is not left behind but delimited and counterposed, remaining that against which the inside is defined, the pretext for and antithesis of the secured body politic. The security project requires the perpetual and simultaneous production and repression of difference: “Race appears in this scheme of things,” David Theo Goldberg writes, “as a mode of crisis management, as a mode . . . of managing manufactured threats, and curtailing while alienating the challenge of the unknown.”²² Race is both that against which society must be secured and the means of its securing.

      From the inception of the state form, liberalist promises of progress and assimilation coexisted, uneasily but necessarily, with essentialist racial narratives that confined the other to an ahistorical emptiness from which there can be no escape. This two-fold racial imagination endures. Naturalist racisms ensure the reproduction of the imaginary of the state of nature, the outside that continues to occupy a central discursive role in Western political orders. Historicist racisms ensure the adaptability of racial thought, which must undergo perpetual transformation in response to evolutions in the mode of production and periodic crises of accumulation. The other who yesterday lacked the capacity for industry may tomorrow be required as a critical source of cheap wage labor.

       Race, Gender, and Social Security

      One effect of Social Security is to clearly define who counts as a properly laboring member of the citizenry, and who does not—who is a public concern and who has a marginal or subordinate place in the calculus of public good. Social Security, in other words, draws a line between the citizen and the non-citizen, and between different occupations, different forms or sectors of labor. From its inception in the United States, Social Security was highly gendered and highly racialized, reproducing the prevailing norms of the time, which confined women and racial minorities to unpaid—as in the case of household work—or lower-paid labor. Agricultural and domestic workers, of whom the vast majority were women and minorities, were not included in the original Social Security act; nearly two thirds of black workers and more than 70 percent of women workers were not covered by the 1935 legislation. And “illegal” immigrants and the non-working population were left out altogether. (This is not to paint the greatest innovation of public services in U.S. history as a reactionary development, but rather to highlight that the content of the original Act did little to challenge—and in important ways even reinforced—the gendered and racialized organization of labor in particular and society more broadly.)

      In her study Pitied but Not Entitled (1994), Linda Gordon writes that the Social Security Act of 1935 “excluded the most needy groups from all its programs, even the inferior ones. These exclusions were deliberate and mainly racially motivated.”²³ The Southern Democrats who controlled Congress were determined to limit the bill’s provisions to the white industrial working class, thereby exacerbating already existing structural inequalities. The exclusion of women from the legislation, moreover, reinforced gendered power relations within and outside the home. As Gwendolyn Mink concludes, “Reflecting masculinist assumptions, gender conventions, and maternalist achievement, the New Deal reproduced social policies contingent on maternal dependence, tying women’s economic security to men’s wages.”²⁴ Social Security legislation enacted processes of exclusion through incorporation; “by routing women and men toward economic security differently, the New Deal entrenched separate, gendered citizenships.”²⁵ It also entrenched separate, racial citizenships. In addition to the marginal place of African Americans in Social Security legislation, the explicitly racialized immigration policy of the 1930s—one based on a national quota system that would prevail until 1965—ensured that white would remain the color of Social Security citizenship for some time to come.

      The categorical exclusions contained within the original Social Security Act did not go uncontested, as the claims of African Americans and women to political recognition and a fuller citizenship translated into significant, if limited and limiting, changes in the form and content of Social Security policy. But the point remains: Social Security is one way of separating the citizen sphere from its outside, and one way of dividing the inside into racial and gender hierarchies both symbolic and real. Like the security project at large, Social Security is simultaneously about social inclusion and social exclusion.

       The Cold War and Racial Security

      During the Cold War, the security of identity existed alongside economic security and military security as an urgent National Security concern. Integral to the embryonic Cold War order was the discursive enunciation of U.S. exceptionalism, which strictly delineated what is “American” from what is “un-American,” what is to be secured—freedom, capitalism, individualism—from what is a threat to “our” security—totalitarianism, communism, collectivism. Reworking enduring colonial binaries, the National Security narrative of the Cold War imagined the communist threat to global capitalist hegemony as irrational and degenerate—a retrograde recapitulation of barbaric tendencies.²⁶ The ownership of property in common, for example, was understood as a savage trait, in opposition to the free system of private property that undergirds U.S. civilization and is the prerequisite for all human progress.²⁷ The racial content of these oppositions is apparent. The “primitive” peoples that the United States must uplift through developmentalist programs or discipline through counterinsurgency warfare are cast in an explicitly racial nomenclature. The convergence of the “red scare” with the “yellow peril” in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, for example, represented the synthesis of various racial tropes, each with its own unique history. But it represented as well the reproduction of the foundational binary between (Western) civilization and its outside. Domestically, moreover, the McCarthyite effort to purge communist contagion from within the national political community occasioned an attack on all manner of radical or alternative social identities and formations. Just as the line separating inside from out needed to be perpetually retraced and reinforced, so too did the composition and social structure of the interior body politic require perpetual definition and control.

      That said, the racial nomos of the United States—its national and international dimensions—was throughout the Cold War subject to and altered by critiques emanating from within and without. The civil rights movement at home, and a combination of Soviet and anticolonial voices abroad, highlighted the contradiction—inherent to the domestic and foreign expression of U.S. state power—between the rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and equality and the endurance of racialized forms of social exclusion and political repression. The contours of this basic contradiction were already apparent during the Second World War, when the United States’ claims of anti-imperialism and its corresponding affirmation of the right to “self-determination” clashed with its transparently expansionary geopolitical ambitions, with the realities of Jim Crow, and with the wartime policy of Japanese internment. “By framing their war propaganda as a struggle

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