Exploring Governmentality, Racism, and the Legacy of Control for Today’s Conversations
Beyond the Buzzwords: addressing the issue of racism today.
Conversations about race, power, and concepts like Critical Race Theory can quickly become tangled. To move beyond surface-level debates and understand the deeper currents, we need tools to analyze how power actually works in society. Why do certain inequalities persist? How does language shape our reality and distribute power?
As someone who delved into these questions during graduate studies, I found the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault incredibly insightful. He wasn’t always easy reading, but his ideas about power offer a powerful lens for understanding the dynamics at play, especially concerning racism.
Instead of diving into dense theory, let’s explore one of Foucault’s key concepts – biopower – and see how he connected it to racism, not just as individual prejudice, but as a fundamental system of governance. This perspective can shed light on the often-unseen mechanisms shaping our world, a core interest here at Mind on Fire Books.
Foucault’s Big Idea: Shifting from Punishment to Managing Life (“Biopower”)
Foucault observed a major shift in how societies were governed, starting around the 18th and 19th centuries.
- The Old Way (Sovereign Power): Think kings and feudal lords. Power was often demonstrated through the right to take life – public executions, punishment, warfare. The sovereign essentially held the power of life and death over subjects. Their main focus wasn’t managing the details of the population’s lives.
- The New Way (Biopower): With the rise of modern states and new scientific knowledge (like statistics), a different form of power emerged. This “biopower” wasn’t primarily about the right to kill, but about the administration and optimization of life. It became concerned with managing populations – think birth rates, public health, life expectancy, productivity. Governments started using knowledge (demography, medicine, economics) to regulate and control populations, aiming to make the collective “species body” stronger, healthier, and more productive.
The focus shifted from the sovereign’s right to “take life or let live” to a new governmental logic aiming to “make live and let die.”
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Making Live and Letting Die: The Dark Side of Biopower
This sounds almost benevolent, right? A state focused on fostering life and well-being? But Foucault identified a disturbing paradox. If the goal of biopower is to maximize the health and vitality of the population, how does it justify actions (or inactions) that harm, neglect, or lead to the decline of certain groups within that population?
How can a system dedicated to “making live” also simultaneously “let die”?
Foucault’s unsettling answer was racism.
He argued that racism wasn’t just a byproduct of ignorance or hatred, but became a crucial mechanism embedded within the logic of biopower itself. It provided the rationale needed to divide the population the state was supposedly nurturing.
Racism as a Tool of Governance
For Foucault, the racism deployed by biopower wasn’t necessarily about simple ethnic hatred. It was often framed in pseudo-scientific, “biological,” or “evolutionist” terms. This type of racism functions by:
- Creating Divisions: It splits the population into distinct groups, often framed as biological “races.”
- Identifying Threats: It designates certain groups (the “inferior” or “degenerate” race) as a threat to the health, purity, or vitality of the main social body.
- Justifying Exclusion/Elimination: By framing a group as a biological danger, biopower can justify actions aimed at neutralizing that threat – actions ranging from neglect and segregation to more overt forms of marginalization or even violence. This allows the state to “let die” certain segments in the name of “making live” or protecting the preferred population.
Racism, in this view, becomes a governing apparatus – a tool used to manage populations by deciding who is worthy of care and optimization, and who can be marginalized or eliminated for the supposed “greater good.”
How Racism Works in Practice: The Historical Construction of the “Black Body”
Foucault’s theory finds a stark illustration in the historical construction of race, particularly concerning Black people.
- Economic Roots: The rise of global trade and the demand for labor in the Americas (starting around the 17th century) created a need to justify the brutal system of enslaving Africans. West African societies engaged in trade, including the trade of enslaved people, but the racialization of slavery required a new ideology.
- Pseudo-Science: Thinkers like Thomas Jefferson began using early forms of “science” to argue for the supposed natural inferiority of Black people, providing a rationale for their enslavement. Later, intelligence tests and other biased “medical discourses” were employed to solidify these racial hierarchies and create “biologized subjects,” as scholar Enoch puts it—defining people by supposedly inherent biological traits linked to race.
- Lingering Legacy: Although science has thoroughly debunked the idea of biological race, the ideology created centuries ago persists. The social construction of race continues to shape realities.
- Biopolitical Consequences: By framing Black people (and other marginalized groups) as inherently different, inferior, or even dangerous (linking them to crime, disease, social ills), the logic of biopower could justify their symbolic “death.” This “letting die” manifests in tangible ways: residential segregation, disparities in healthcare and education, police brutality, and mass incarceration via the prison-industrial complex. These become rationalized as necessary measures to protect the dominant social body.
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Why Foucault Still Matters: Racism as Governmentality
Understanding Foucault’s perspective pushes us beyond seeing racism solely as individual acts of prejudice or irrational hate. It encourages us to see racism also as:
- A Technology of Power: A calculated technique used historically (and arguably presently) by governing forces.
- Biopolitical: Deeply intertwined with managing populations, health, and societal well-being (or perceived well-being).
- Systemic: Embedded within institutions and rationalities that decide who “lives” and who is “left to die” in myriad ways.
Foucault’s analysis doesn’t excuse individual bigotry, but it reveals the deeper, structural ways racism operates as a form of governmental rationality. It provides critical tools for analyzing the power dynamics that underpin many of the persistent racial inequalities we grapple with today. Recognizing these mechanisms is a crucial step towards dismantling them.
Thank you for visiting with us. For more Reviews or Literature related content, visit our blog at The Ritual. Copyright Mind on Fire Books.
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