The centering of European racial scripts recreates genocidal racial warfare on a global scale leading to existential annihilation

Alexander D. Barder, “Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy”, Oxford University Press, Pages 19-28, 2 August 2021,

The rapid expansion of European settler colonialism beginning in the fifteenth century had profound ramifications for the emergence of the idea of the global. What emerged in the aftermath of the genocidal land appropriation in North and South America and the enslavement of Africans was a racialized transnational political economy that came to structure the very foundation of proto-capital accumulation and an imaginary of the global based on racial hierarchy. With respect to the former, Cedric Robinson famously argued that the rise of the “world system” was predicated upon what he calls the formation of “racial capitalism,” which itself emerged from an already racially striated European continent.33 Europe’s own internal “others” were already subject to forms of racialized dispossession, internal colonialism, and indentured servitude or slavery, which would provide the model for European expansion, appropriation of land, and enslavement of peoples across the centuries—essentially, building the global order. As Robinson writes, “Racism . . . was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”34 The important point that Robinson makes is that race should not be viewed as a form of ideological mystification that provides, in a sense, a cover for the violence of accumulation and dispossession at the heart of the European colonial project. “Racialism,” Robinson adds, should be understood as a “material force . . . [that] would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”35 In other words, what is at work here is a process of racialization that expanded across the planet and created a material and ideological reality in which racial difference and hierarchy came to be understood as constitutive of the order of things.36

What interests me, in particular, are the implications of this materialization of race for understanding the development of what I call a global racial imaginary. How is it that race can become itself a “material force” or embody a material reality that effectively constitutes the underlying intelligibility of social reality? This is of course not to suggest that race has any basis in a biological materiality; rather, as Michael Hanchard puts it, “[Racial] symbols, meanings and material practices distinguish dominant and subordinate subjects according to their racial categorizations. Race in this regard is not only a marker of phenotypical difference, but of status, class, and political power.”37 The sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued that racism cannot simply be viewed as the product of an irrational individual prejudice or of atavistic legacies; rather, racism is the consequence of processes of racialization, which, for Bonilla-Silva, “forms a real structure—that racialized groups are hierarchically ordered and ‘social relations’ and ‘practices’ emerge that fit the position of the groups in the racial regime.” As Bonilla-Silva continues,

The analytical crux for understanding racism is uncovering the mechanisms and practices (behaviors, styles, cultural affectations, traditions, and organizational procedures) at the social, economic, ideological, and political levels responsible for the reproduction of racial domination. I labeled my approach material because the views and behaviors of actors are fundamentally connected to their position [in] a racial regime.38

The materiality of racial order gives a sense of the solidity of racial hierarchies that congealed during moments of violent domination, which comes to be seen as entirely natural. To think the racial order in material terms is to understand that its ideological formation is predicated on the natural longevity of racial hierarchy across history—even if its content changes over time. It is this ideological configuration that gave intelligibility to the perpetuation of colonial subjugation that Europeans employed in the New World and the Atlantic slave trade and that would then form the basis of emergent global order of the nineteenth century. Thus, as Bonilla-Silva continues, “Racialized societies could not survive without ideology as it fulfills five vital functions, namely accounting for the existence of racial inequality, providing basic rules on engagement in interracial interactions, furnishing the basis for actors’ racial subjectivity, shaping and influencing the views of dominated actors, and, by claiming universality, hiding the fact of racial domination.”39 This racial ideology, when it comes to its role in the emergence of the global, I call the global racial imaginary.

A social imaginary, Charles Taylor argues, is how “people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”40 A social imaginary reflects the manner in which “ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is not often expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.”41 Furthermore, Taylor adds, a social imaginary is not a theoretical vantage point by a minority but rather reflective of a constitutive understanding of the world that brings together a people as such. A social imaginary legitimizes practices that are typically seen as entirely natural and selfevident to the social life of the group. Taylor emphasizes the extent to which the social imaginary is akin to a “social map” and facilitates “how we stand to each other, how we got to where we are, how we relate to other groups, and so on.”42 Taylor does not, to be sure, extend his understanding of the social imaginary to the very processes of racialization that have come to be so important in modernity. To focus on race would certainly contradict his own objective, to show that modernity was the “order of mutual benefit” among individuals even under conditions of hierarchy. And yet it is here where the development of race plays a crucial role in defining the very “social map” that would implicate not only Western polities themselves but the very modern global order. A racial imaginary integrates the material and ideological foundations—the very “mechanisms and practices” BonillaSilva refers to—and reflects specifically the placement of different groups within a hierarchical order. A racial imaginary then provides a “social map” in making that hierarchical order appear self-evident and entirely the natural byproduct of certain immanent societal developments rather than violent appropriation or domination. Extending the concept of the racial imaginary to the idea of the global, I claim that the very “images, stories, and legends” that made the global intelligible qua global came out of the long history of settler colonial appropriation and a transnational racial formation. The content of the global racial imaginary solidified itself in the eighteenth century with the acceleration of European colonial projects, particularly Franco-British colonization in North America, the Caribbean, and India. But it also began to crystalize with an entire intellectual foundation for rethinking the place and interactions with non-European peoples. The “social map” that inchoately developed throughout the eighteenth century rested upon a language rooted in the natural sciences and climate theory that would only be more fully developed in the following century. 43 The advent of a substantial travel literature and proto-ethnological and geographical knowledge would percolate a view of the immeasurable gulf, not only in civilizational attributes but in mental faculties, between Europeans and their “others,” especially in Africa and the western hemisphere. It created the very categories, classification schemes, and scientific typologies that would congeal in the racial science of the following century. And as a consequence, it created the very sensus communis that gave this political-economic global order its racialized hierarchy.

As I mentioned earlier, then, the acknowledgment of racially different peoples would have consequences for how Europeans imagined their own civil society and the state. Here Charles Mill’s notion of the racial contract is key. Mills shows that embedded in social contract theory is an epistemological claim that implicitly imagines the world it creates. What Mills calls the racial contract acknowledges that this epistemological assumption rests upon a demarcation at the heart of humanity in which whites (understood, ultimately “a set of power relations”) are to be distinguished from nonwhites.44 As Mills writes,

The Racial Contract is that set of formal and informal agreements or meta-agreements (higherlevel contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 . . . as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities the whites either already inhabit or established or in transactions as aliens with these polities, and the moral and juridical rules normally regulating the behavior of whites in their dealings with one another either do not apply at all in dealings with nonwhites or apply only in a qualified form (depending in part on changing historical circumstances and what particular variety of nonwhite is involved), but in any case the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them.45

The racial contract, which forms ultimately the basis of a contractual society, “requires the intervention of white men, who are thereby positioned as already sociopolitical beings.”46 It as a consequence assumes that nonwhites bodies are restricted from the political space, “being judged incapable of forming or fully entering into a body politic.”47 As Mills notes, this idea of inability to form or enter the political can be traced back to Aristotle and the stark division between Greek and non-Greeks, for whom the latter were inherently or natural slaves. It comes then to structure an entire edifice of thought with respect to the Native Americans in the New World or to Africans, for whom the “Racial Contract establishes a fundamental partition in the social ontology of the planet” and thus relegates them to being “Untermenschen.”48 The racial contract, moreover, implicates the development of a European order of states. The field of international relations, which largely takes for granted the universalizable moment of the state system, reflected this racial contract.49 The intelligibility of the European order, as a society or community of sovereigns bound by a common set of rules limiting violence, was predicated on the exclusion of non-Europeans from such an order, all the while including them through violent expropriation and domination.

While the racial contract provides the theoretical or conceptual basis for understanding how domestic and international politics remains constituted on the basis of racial difference and hierarchy, the racial imaginary is the percolation of the racial contract into the everydayness of the lifeworld. What really connects Mill’s notion of the racial contract with the racial imaginary is the fear and anxiety of its potential dismantlement at the hands of so-called inferior races. Violence, then, becomes the ever-present practice meant to preclude what Mills calls the “ontological shudder [that] has been sent through the system of the white polity, calling forth what could be called the white terror to make sure that the foundations of the moral and political universe stay in place.”50

In this sense, I share a recognition of the historical and contemporary uniqueness of the racial violence that Afro-pessimism takes as central to the formation of Western modernity, as I alluded to previously. For Afropessimist theorists, the historical and contemporary connections with slavery’s gratuitous violence structurally permeate, specifically, American society to the present with the proliferation of violence against Black bodies by a whole host of state institutions. Such violence cannot be taken as strictly instrumental, however. Rather, as Frank B. Wilderson III argues, “Violence against Black people is a mechanism for the usurpation of subjectivity, of life, of being.”51 Such violence maintains, as Wilderson continues, the “psychic stability in all others who are not slaves.”52 Wilderson then contrasts this with the genocidal violence perpetuated against Native Americans. Such genocidal violence is for him reflective of a “usurpation of cartography, of space” and holds a different ontological status than the violence perpetuated against Black life.53 However, this juxtaposition between genocidal violence as constitutive of liberal “white” modernity versus its instrumentalization as a settler-colonial or imperial project has the (unintended) consequence of creating an a priori ontological chasm: the genocide of Black lives becomes a congealed and reified ahistorical (i.e., depoliticized) structure, whereas the genocide of Native Americas is of history. 54 Rather than assuming such a profound ontological and ultimately ethical chasm, it is perhaps more useful to think in terms of an ontology plasticity to describe the historical transformations of the very “destructive processes” at the heart of the global racial imaginary. Following Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, which for her signifies the alteration of form, Benjamin Meiches argues that genocidal “destructive processes exhibit ontological features of plasticity insofar as they form, reform and transform themselves and others in the process of unfolding.”55 Thinking in terms of an ontology of plasticity reveals instead that “destructive processes . . . become horrifyingly creative or productive.” And as Meiches continues, “These transformations . . . invent new scales, intensities, and forms of violence that develop in unforeseeable ways, a mutation of violence that does not obey a taxonomy of different stages or levels, but that would emerge as the capacity for relations of violence to undergo self-reformation and transformation.”56 Such an ontology would consider the various historical moments that congealed the global as racial hierarchy to continue to contribute to the “self-reformation and transformation” of racialized violence as necessarily constitutive of the global racial imaginary. Put differently, the “genocidal usurpation of subjectivity” is always historically co-constitutive with the “usurpation of cartography or space” that has made up the modern Western settler-colonial project over the past four centuries.

Race War

As the European colonial and imperial projects across the planet proceeded apace, the deployment of racial ideology as an imaginary became increasingly accepted as a natural feature of the social fabric of the global. But what is important to recognize is that the racialization of the global could never be an entirely smooth process. Racialization is always a process of contestation. As Bonilla-Silva writes, “Because races are always in a relation of opposition, racial contestation is the crucial driving force of any racialized social system.”57 But what does this mean for understanding the global racial imaginary? If, as Taylor argues, the imaginary is a social map that helps us navigate the placement of different groups, that tells us what to expect from our relations with others, the processes of contestation at the heart of the global racial imaginary are always, in a sense, putting into question such relations or expectations. In other words, there’s always an inherent instability—an “ontological shudder,” as Mills calls it—within the global racial imaginary that provokes incessant anxiety and fear that the racial hierarchies are themselves prone to crisis and violent upheaval. Hence the surfeit of violence comes out of this very instability of a racialized imaginary. Any crisis or calling into question of white supremacy, then, is met with extraordinary and creative violence unrestrained by the very rules that make up a common political world. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the Haitian Revolution was such an event. Faced with a slave insurrection, the French imagine that their only response is the extermination of the Black population and its replacement with new slaves. Such fantasies and fears of racial annihilation that the revolution embodied —especially in the aftermath of the liquidation of the white population by Dessalines in 1804—represented the credible vision of what happens to a racially mixed society when white supremacy is undermined. This fear was particularly prevalent in the early American Republic with its own growing enslaved population. By the early twentieth century (Chapter 4), racial violence and annihilation become the language through which to understand the degeneration of multiethnic empires and what the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau, describes as the racial murder of the Armenians in 1915. By the 1940s, the project of Nazi genocide (Chapter 5) as racial annihilation is entirely predicated on not only the biopolitical fear and anxiety of infiltration and contamination, but the larger necessity of radically destroying any political structure that stands in the way of racial differentiation and hierarchy.

The violence of racial war is a violence imagined à outrance. It is not subject to the restraints of war politically defined by any sense of mutual recognition. In this sense, it characterizes the settler-colonial projects on the global periphery. And yet, in dialectical fashion, it defines the very parameters of what is supposed to be the political world. Hence, for example, racial war is often described as the type of conflict that occurs outside the politico-juridical boundaries of Europe. Duncan Bell quotes a remarkable passage from the late nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky from his 1893 essay “The Empire: Its Value and Its Growth”:

Remember what India had been for countless ages before the establishment of British rule. Think of the endless wars of race and creed, its savage oppressions, its fierce anarchies, its barbarous customs, and then consider what it is to have established for some many years over the vast space of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin a reign of perfect peace; to have conferred upon more than 250 millions of the human race perfect religious freedom, perfect security of life, liberty, and property; to have planted in the midst of these teeming multitudes a strong central government, enlightened by the best knowledge of Western Europe, and steadily occupied in preventing famine, alleviating disease, extirpating savage customs, multiplying the agencies of civilization and progress.58

The passage is, first of all, an illustration of what Mills refers to as an “epistemology of ignorance” in which misrepresentation aids in the project of empire and the legitimacy and maintenance of racial hierarchies.59 Of course, it bears little or almost no resemblance to what precolonial India actually was. However, it conveys to the reader an imaginary space without history—“countless ages”—a space of “teaming multitudes” wracked by “savage customs” and mired in “endless wars of race and creed.”60 While British imperial rule represents “civilization and progress” versus the anarchy and chaos of native government, it highlights in the mind of the reader the very idea that a world without European supremacy will invariably be one where such civilization and progress comes to an end and the “endless wars of race and creed” return. British imperial rule, and. in fact, the indefinite domination of Western/white civilization, is then a prophylaxis against the very chaos and “barbarity” that always lurks in the background. A few decades later, Lothrop Stoddard, the infamous American racist writer, emphasized this ever-present threat by conflating civilization with race: “If white civilization goes down, the white race is irredeemably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption.”61 The defense of “civilization” is a racialized defense that comes to play an important role in post–Second World War Western discourse. Indeed, as I argue in Chapters 8 and 9, references to civilization and civilizational conflict represents another form of racialization of the global imaginary and a fear of a world in which white Western supremacy will no longer endure. From Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” to so-called theories of population replacement, or the “Great Replacement,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is this unremitting assumption that Western civilization is always threatened by an encroaching racialized other.

The concept of race war here serves not just as Michel Foucault articulated it in his important 1975–76 lectures at the Collège de France, as a counter-history or counter-concept that ultimately fuses itself to state practice. As Foucault saw it, race war as a concept evolved from an aristocratic description of the incessant internal conflicts between rival groups to its fusion with state practice as a way of defining the survivability of a population and legitimation of sovereign power to excise such biopolitical threats.62 Modern biopolitical state power, Foucault argues, operationalizes “racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements, and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization.”63 The salience of Foucault’s analysis of the nexus between race war and state power is the extraordinary malleability of its deployment by a variety of modern states. Though Foucault’s genealogy of sovereign and biopolitical power remains a crucial history of the modern state, its goal of elucidating the inner working of biopower ends up neglecting the very prevalence of racial conflict as a conflict between different races. As Alexander Weheliye shows, Foucault’s notion of the biopolitical rests upon a set of spatiotemporal and geographical assumptions that ultimately reflect colonialist discourses of the natural and inevitable confrontation between non-European races (ethnic racism) versus a race and racism internal to European political history (biopolitics). As Weheliye writes, “Foucault never interrogates the bare existence of racial difference and those hierarchies fabricated upon this primordial notion and, as a result, reinscribes racial difference as natural.”64 By relegating what Weheliye calls “ethnic racism” to the geohistorical periphery in order to emphasize the development of the biopolitical in the West, Foucault misses the continued importance (of alternative forms of) racial war to structure not just state biopower but especially the very ontological and normative ideal of a world worth living for. When the ontological and normative commitments to the global racial imaginary appear to be called into question—through a world in which non-Western powers assert themselves to reshape global order, or through fears of immigration into Western polities from the global South—what Mbembe calls a “fantasy of annihilation” is resurrected. “This fantasy,” Mbembe writes, “is present in every context in which social forces tend to conceive the political as a struggle to the death against unconditional enemies. Such struggle is then qualified as existential. It is a struggle with no possibility of mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation.”65 Race war is the outcome, for Mbembe, of a metaphysics of Western universality unable to think “through its own finitude.”66 In other words, it is easier to imagine the end of the world, a “purification by fire,” as Mbembe puts it, than to share it with others.67