Biopolitical power exertion for the optimization of society enforces racialized and gendered definitions of who counts as ‘human’ and justifies violence towards non-white subjects as a necessity for preservation of the future.

As the articles in this issue suggest, when racism is “crucified in public only to be born again in private,” (: 24) we must attend to how race is (re-)produced globally through biopolitical practices. However, the sharp turn and parallel track of the present moment, in which white supremacy is once again openly embraced in the public sphere, only reveals the absurdity of claims to a “post-racial era.” Now, more than ever (or perhaps, just as much as always?), political life is figured as a battle for a particular kind of future; in fact, the future is the term of the battle itself. Trump’s signature phrase and line of hats, “Make America Great Again,” is a fundamentally biopolitical statement of a strikingly racialized and gendered future. Recent political events demand our attention not as breaks with the past, but for the continuities they reveal about the grammar of humanity () through which life and death are made sensible.

These issues of national concern resonate with the global turn to the right – in Britain, India, the Philippines, Turkey, France, Brazil, and other contexts – that is emerging in local forms but holds at its center sharp disagreements over the future. While the Movement for Black Lives articulates the centrality of anti-Blackness to United States racialization, the embedded analysis questions the global workings of empire, and coloniality: when and how do some lives and bodies matter? Disciplinary mechanisms of anti-Blackness and white supremacy serve as a template for global variations of the biopolitical, which, at their very core, rely on fundamentally racialized definitions of who counts as ‘human’ that have proven very durable (; ; ; ; ; ).

Global demographic changes – Europe’s influx of previously colonized peoples and predictions of a 2043 non-white majority in the US, for instance – have instigated deep-seated white racial anxieties in the Global North (), while in postcolonial contexts, racism intersects with ethnic, religious and class hierarchies (; ), adhering whiteness to some bodies through class processes (). Transnationally, Malthusian imaginings of population growth haunt biopolitical discourses, echoing colonial imaginaries – : 250), recalls an IVF doctor casually remarking to her in Mexico City: “Look at all the traffic – we are just too many. We don’t have to think about how to make more babies with ART or surrogacy like you Europeans, for us the question is how to control fertility.” These anxieties hinge critically on visions of and meanings attributed to the future. In this special section, we argue that framings of race are crucially about shaping the future, and likewise, future imaginaries are central to present biopolitical operations. In the language of : 1530), there is a “folding of futures and pasts into a present where, in turn, futures are constantly being produced.” Thus, we call for greater attention to the ways that temporality, and, in particular, futurity is at the heart of biopolitical practice.

This spatio-temporality of race is also caught up in the ways that people and places are temporally marked as being “advanced” or “backward” in relation to science and modernity, a biopolitical move critiqued by , picked up in this issue by Olund and by Ehlers and Krupar. This epistemological grammar centers futurity in the white subject and disqualifies non-white subjects from full humanity and thus from a forward-oriented agency, or confines these subjects to zones of death and sacrifice in service to white futurity (; ; ; ; ; ; ; ). Temporality allows us to unpack racial biopolitics and think through how whiteness is figured in terms of urgency and generational vertigo – irrevocable generational change (; ; ). In contrast, the deaths of Black, brown, colonized, and other non-white subjects are infused with a sense of ordinariness, a wearing down of life towards slow and enduring death (; ). In particular, an ever present “vulnerability to premature death” (: 28), associates blackness with an unremarkable and inevitable “social death” intimately intertwined with the historical project of vitalism and the quest for optimization of life (; ; ).