Conclusion: (Re)Producing (Neo)Colonial Relations of Authority and Racial and Eugenic Systems of Violence

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine the implications of deeply hurtful and intergenerational forms of racialized and eugenic violence within professional practice, disciplines, policies, law, and within the operations and technologies of contemporary institutions. The use of figurative language to represent contemporarily accepted forms of biological inferiority, inherent unrehabilitatable criminality, or to identify someone as an undeserving alien are no less violent than literal deployments of these meanings as their (re)produced outcomes are the same: a denial of care, responsibility, and humanity. In this study we have witnessed the use of very particular colonial tropes for the constructing of identities of dehumanized difference and the reliance on racial and eugenic rationale to provide the authority for and legitimization of violence. These deeply historical interdependent processes constituting the confluence of mental health, criminal justice, and immigration systems may have us question our conceptions of progress or advancement, of anti-oppressive or anti-racist proposals for their complicity in the continuation of the production of ordered subjects, a reliance on old colonial machinery, and the (re)positioning of authority and legitimacy through violence and difference.