ABSTRACT

This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s definition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a complex set of correlations that are employed for the purpose of establishing (ab)normality and exercising various forms of expulsion. Racialization is then seen as the circulation of knowledge that makes racial categorization evident as scientific truth, linked to themes of science, developmentality, and the governing of population. To illustrate its subjective materialization, I analyze childhood memories of school told by undergraduates of color at one large public university in New York City. In what follows, I present three narratives that exemplify the production of difference and abnormality, as a biopolitical strategy with racial significance, arguing that positivist school reforms and developmental theories in education cannot be thought of as separate from the mobilization of racial identity and experience. At its end, I argue that we must unravel our familiar ways of thinking about race and push against the constructs of normality that can have detrimental effects on everyday economic, political and social life.

摘要

本文借鉴了米歇尔·福柯的著作以及他最近重新考虑的对种族和种族化的挑衅。使用福柯对“内部种族主义”的定义，种族被理解为一组复杂的相关性，用于建立（异常）常态和实施各种形式的驱逐。然后，种族化被视为知识的流通，使种族分类明显成为科学真理，与科学、发展和人口管理等主题相关联。为了说明它的主观具体化，我分析了纽约市一所大型公立大学的有色人种本科生讲述的童年记忆。在下文中，我提出了三个说明差异和异常产生的叙述，作为具有种族意义的生命政治策略，认为实证主义的学校改革和教育发展理论不能被认为与种族认同和经验的动员分开。最后，我认为我们必须解开我们熟悉的种族思维方式，并反对可能对日常经济、政治和社会生活产生不利影响的常态结构。