Race, Racism and Identification in the Era of Technosecurity

ABSTRACT

In the era of technosecurity the State’s concerns with migration, terrorism, and crime are increasingly entangled. This is reflected in the development of identification systems that depend on the collection and analysis of both data and bodily traces. Race is a persistent if sometimes elusive element in this. Examination of three domains of innovation in technosecurity – the management of dispersed borders, the expanding use of DNA in criminal justice, and the sourcing, sharing and analysis of digitized facial images – reveals the complexities of the resulting politics. Across these different domains, there is a varied and ambiguous relationship between explicit race talk and patterns of disadvantage. This can obscure a common underlying pattern: emerging socio-technical arrangements, directly or indirectly, highlight and discriminate against minorities. The inter-dependences of security and technology reconfigure the race object as an unstable assemblage of corporeal, digital, and discursive elements. The implementation and management of new identification systems often accommodate to contemporary sensitivities around cultural difference and expression of identity but in ways that do little to address the structured inequalities they reinforce.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• racism
• identity
• forensics
• borders
• visualization

Acknowledgments

I thank Katrin Kämpf and Jutta Weber for their support and the opportunity to contribute to this Special Issue. I would also like to record my gratitude to Les Levidow and two anonymous reviewers who did so much to improve the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Skinner is Reader in Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He has published extensively on the changing politics of race and science. He is currently writing a book exploring the remaking of race in new policing technologies.