Veils of Prejudice: Race and Class in the Current Conjuncture

Abstract

Building on W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2012) insights on ‘race as a medium’ and a ‘framework of seeing through or seeing as,’ this essay argues that debates on Sudanese ‘criminal gangs’ in Melbourne, Australia; policies to counter alleged ‘radicalisation’ among Muslim youth in the UK; the continuing struggles for indigenous land rights; and rejections of asylum seekers almost everywhere in the West, attest to the operations of technologies of bureaucracy which, in turn, mobilise racially prejudiced systems of classification and patterns of misrecognition. Understanding the present conjuncture or the current crisis is integral to any politics opposing such classificatory systems and prejudicial ideologies. As Stuart Hall has reminded us, this involves taking into account ‘“relatively autonomous” sites—which have different origins, are driven by different contradictions, and develop according to their own temporalities’ which ‘are nevertheless “convened” or condensed in the same moment’ (Hall and Massey in Soundings 44: 38). Arguments over what constitutes the ‘real’ in these instances are not so much about ‘fake news’ as the ways in which images go ‘before’ the black immigrant, the Muslim youth, the asylum seeker, or the indigenous community in the form of abiding stereotypes that shape newer systems of misrecognition and misrepresentation. However, analysing the present conjuncture and the current crisis, of which such forms of misrecognition are emblematic, involves examining not just the ‘dominant’ or hegemonic but also, as Raymond Williams recommended (and John Clarke [2014] recently reiterated), considering the multiple temporalities and formations that together constitute the ‘emergent’ and the ‘residual.’ Using Policing the Crisis as a model, this essay draws on the recent work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Saskia Sassen, Patrick Wolfe, Arjun Appadurai and David Roediger to examine digital mediations/interventions by indigenous and refugee communities, recent protest movements, and the entanglements of race and class to argue that indigenous and refugee communities, along with the global poor, comprise the global subaltern. While the reasons for their current precarity and the various aspects that comprise their subaltern conditions may differ between these groups, the politics of ‘race,’ ethnicity and exclusion, and of representation and ‘voice,’ appear to impinge on both their material and their digital presence in similar ways.