LITMIR.BIZ

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of their own colonial and segregationist practices.”²⁸ In the early stages of the Cold War, this critique was taken up by the Soviet Union, which highlighted the inequality and discrimination endemic to U.S. society. If failing to radically alter the dominant racial paradigms of the war, this line of criticism did have significant consequence, pressuring administrations from Truman to Johnson into a less tepid—if still profoundly qualified, and motivated as much by diplomatic as by moral concerns—embrace of civil rights transformations.

      The conjoined critique of segregation at home and militaristic meddling abroad had less impact on U.S. conduct in the world—compelling not major foreign policy changes but the addition of further euphemistic cover for the proxy wars and counterinsurgency conflicts sanctioned by the containment doctrine. Moreover, as Mary Dudziak, Carol Anderson, and others have argued, McCarthyite repression blunted the anti-capitalist, internationalist potentialities of the civil rights movement.²⁹ In other words, Cold War concerns over image nudged the U.S. government in a slightly more progressive direction on civil rights issues but de-radicalized the civil rights movement itself—marginalizing its anticolonial voice and preventing the emergence of a more comprehensive struggle for social and economic change.

      Broadly speaking, the securing of racial order in the moment of the Cold War involved the careful balancing of exclusionary and inclusionary narratives and policies—the line separating “us” from “them” was rigorously defined and policed while a measured politics of inclusion reshaped the United States’ racial landscape. The dual nature of the modern security project’s racial logic—the delineation of inside and outside and differentiation of the inside—was transformed but not transcended by the struggle for civil rights nationally and independence globally.

       Race and Neoliberalism

      The neoliberal transformations begun in the early 1970s and intensified in the 1980s were accompanied by evolutions in the way racial difference was thought about and acted upon—not the invention of a completely new conceptualization of race, but the subtle adaptation of extant racial narratives and practices to the changing imperatives of both capital and state. The “flexible,” post-Fordist forms of accumulation heralded by neoliberal doctrine require more “flexible” racial imaginaries.

      Theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Fredric Jameson argue that in the late capitalist moment there is no longer an outside. The process of modernization is complete; nature has been completely assimilated into the social order. For Hardt and Negri, the movement from “modern” to “imperial” sovereignty represents the movement beyond the “fixed and eternal boundaries” of modern colonial racism toward a racism defined by “the play of differences and the management of micro-conflictualities within [imperial order’s] continually expanding domain.”³⁰ While right to note the more “fluid and amorphous”—yet still “stable and brutal”—racial ideology deployed in neoliberal governance, they go too far in pronouncing the disappearance of the outside altogether.³¹ “The central moment of modern racism . . . the global antithesis between inside and outside”³² persists, even if the precise delineation of that foundational boundary is subject to periodic redrawing. A racism that rests upon a “strategy of differential inclusion” can coexist with a racism that rests upon binary exclusion. Indeed, the modern security project has always maintained a balance between these two modes of racial practice. The newness of the neoliberal moment is evinced by the dexterity with which imperial order navigates between them—casting superfluous bodies or convenient enemies into the outside, while incorporating non-capitalized space and a multiplicity of others into its sphere of power and tribute. In the neoliberal moment, triumphalist narratives of an imminent “post-racialism” coincide with loud reassertions of absolute civilizational alterity. The premature universal and the retrograde particular stand side by side.

       The Racial State after September 11

      Within the discursive frames of the War on Terror, “homeland” evokes a bounded territorial space with a definitive outside that must be resisted and policed. This boundary, moreover, is understood to define not just geography but the limits of a distinct ethno-political or ethno-cultural community. It suggests, in other words, the enduring dream of the perfect imbrication of race, space, and nation. And it implies as well that abiding imperial anxiety: the specter of difference encountered in the world returning home to corrupt the essential cultural homogeneity and social or economic integrity of the nation-state. In this way, the term “homeland” is ideally suited to the security project in its postcolonial yet still manifestly imperialist incarnation. It describes the peculiar predicament of a fading imperial power reverting to blood-soil nativism as its military marches around the world under the banner of Enlightenment universals.

      The racial logic of Homeland Security governance was laid bare by Katrina floodwaters. Following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s poorest residents, of whom the vast majority were African American, were left to fend for their own survival, or—as was the fate of nearly 2,000 people—to die. Tens of thousands crowded into stadiums, convention centers, or along elevated stretches of highway, without adequate food, water, or medical attention. Affecting images of government failure in New Orleans played across the television news, but so too did images of “out-of-control” black residents “looting” abandoned supermarkets. When the federal relief effort did arrive, its loyalties were ambivalent—divided between protecting the property of New Orleans’s wealthier residents and aiding in the survival of its most marginal and most vulnerable. The security of the former seemed to take precedence, as the incessant media invocation of “looters” and marauding “armed gangs” served to criminalize the hurricane’s victims and highlight the final sanctity of private property. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco gave soldiers authorization to “shoot to kill” in the course of their order-restoring mission: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle-tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. . . . They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. . . . These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.”³³ Subsequently, those displaced by the hurricane were labeled “refugees” by the media: first criminalized, and then symbolically stripped of their citizenship.³⁴

      When Governor Blanco highlighted the Iraq War experience of the soldiers called upon to enforce order in post-Katrina New Orleans, she revealed the profound connections between racialized militarism in the homeland and in the world. This connection is further evidenced by the governance of and public discourse surrounding immigration. Dispossessed of economic self-determination by free-trade agreements, the legacies of colonial expropriation, and related geographic inequities, migrants from the global South arrive in the North as living reminders of imperial brutalities present and past. Their presence in the metropole, though, does not provoke a serious reckoning with either neoliberal governance—and the state failure and social death it engenders—or the living sediment of colonial histories. Instead, in the dominant media and governmental discourses the presence of immigrants is either affirmatively cited as proof of democratic tolerance and multicultural vitality or condemned as an attack on domestic labor, drain on public services, and threat to normative national identity—as a cause, in other words, of both cultural and economic crisis. This ambivalence should not disguise the central import of each racial narrative—the universalist and the nativist—to the Homeland Security project in particular and to the modern security project in general.

      SECURITY AND EMERGENCY

      As elaborated above, capital and race are two keywords of the modern security project. The triad of security terms “prerogative/emergency/exception”—all of which here refer to the political movement, by an executive power, beyond the normative constraints of legislative or juridical democratic process—is another crucial entry in the security lexicon. Executive prerogative is unsurprisingly central to the pre-liberal or “absolutist” philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But as Mark Neocleous demonstrates, prerogative and exception are also of great import to the liberalism of John Locke.³⁵ There are moments of political exigency, Locke allows, when the legislature is incapable of acting with the required expediency; the executive power must in these instances arrest democratic deliberation and enact the power of decision.

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