Antiterrorism, Race, and the New Frontier: American Exceptionalism, Imperial Multiculturalism, and the Global Security State

Abstract

Following Barack Obama's election as United States president, the illusion that the worst excesses of the Bush administration are now simply finished must be tempered by a sober assessment of the deeply consequential institutionalization of antiterrorism as the intransigent idiom of a new species of security state formation. Obama's assumption of responsibility for the conduct of the so-called War on Terror has committed him to the dominant ethos of antiterrorism and a multifaceted program of securitization, “domestically” and internationally. Furthermore, the task of reinvigorating United States nationalism by exalting American exceptionalism is one that deeply conjoins Obama with his predecessor. This is, perhaps, nowhere so evident as in Obama's dissimulations of the racial singularity and salience of his accession to the presidency. Indeed, he compulsively deracialized his election in favor of an American exceptionalist gesture of patriotic postracialism. This essay interrogates the relation between this “postracial” Americanism and a distinctly imperial multiculturalism. Through this “postracial” and assimilationist vision of empire, and by means of the crucial (racially ambiguous) figure of the Muslim, the United States has fashioned itself as the decisive police power of an incipient Global Security State, charged with putting in order the wild new frontiers of an unruly planet.

Keywords:

• Race
• postracialism
• War on Terror
• the Muslim Question
• Obama
• United States
• empire

This essay was first prepared as a keynote lecture delivered to the conference “The New Frontiers of Race: Criminalities, Cultures, and Policing in the Global Era,” sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, at the University of Chicago, 29 May 2009. I thank the organizers, Gilberto Rosas and Ramón Gutiérrez, for their gracious invitation, all who participated in the workshop and enriched this paper with their own fine work, and Jasbir Puar, Elana Zilberg, and Ralph Cintrón in particular for their thoughtful comments. I am deeply grateful for the critical engagement and insightful reflections of several other colleagues: Amanda Gilliam, Nisha Kapoor, Maria Kromidas, Nathalie Peutz, Josh Price, Dave Roediger, Sunonda Samaddar, Justin Stearns, and Howie Winant..

Notes

1. For more extended elaborations of Debord's conception of the society of the spectacle, see De Genova (2010a, n.d.).

2. Upon closer inspection, of the seventy-four former prisoners alleged by the Pentagon report to be engaged in terrorism, only twenty-nine were identified by name, and only five could be independently verified to have engaged in, or even simply threatened to engage in, “terrorist” activity (Bumiller 2009).

3. Among the so-called “homegrown” terrorists, denigrated as “jailhouse converts,” the alleged plot was strictly “aspirational” in that the FBI “fully controlled” the whole affair (Baker and Hernandez 2009), which “played out on a veritable soundstage of hidden cameras and secret microphones” (Wilson 2009). An FBI informant previously arrested and sentenced to five-years' probation for “identity theft” cultivated and effectively recruited a motley crew composed of an alleged “crack addict,” a drug dealer, an unemployed purse snatcher medicated for schizophrenia or a bipolar disorder “living in squalor” amidst “bottles of urine,” and a “particularly violent” steakhouse employee who “lately had grown a beard and taken to reading the Koran” (Wilson 2009). Mosque members reported that the suspected government informant, “the stranger with all the money,” conspicuously “seemed to focus most of his attention on younger black members and visitors” (Rashbaum and Fahim 2009).

4. For an extended legal elaboration of the reasoning in favor of a statutory delimitation of permissible “preventative” detention, see Cole (2009).

5. Even the most prominent intellectual publicist and advocate of the idea of American exceptionalism, Martin Seymour Lipset, eventually professes his faith in the active intervention of divine providence in United States history (1996: 14).

6. One need only recall Washington's lament, with regard to Black Americans: “Among a large class there seemed to be a dependence upon the Government for every conceivable thing. The members of this class had little ambition to create a position for themselves, but wanted the federal officials to create a position for them” (1901/1995: 43). And, further: “I had a strong feeling that what our people most needed was to get a foundation in education, industry, and property, and for this I felt that they could better afford to strive than for political preferment” (44).

7. Indeed, following what DuBois called the Reconstruction-era's “full-fledged government” (1903/1969: 66) of “the emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation” (62), postemancipation African American mobility came to routinely signal for the propertied classes a failure of government—a dangerously inadequate reconstruction of Black servitude, such that Black people's freedom of movement had likewise to be reconstructed as willful “vagrancy,” shadowing literal bondage with the ostensible “crime” of vagabondage (Hopper and Milburn 1996: 124). I am grateful to Lynn Lewis, whose research as an activist and scholar concerned with race and homelessness in the United States brought this particular reference, and the convergence of these themes, into clarity for me.

8. See:<www.barackobama.com/factcheck/2007/11/12/obama_has_never_been_a_muslim_1.php#obama-not-muslim>.

9. See: <http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/christian>.

10. In all of this, it is instructive to recall that the ideological antecedent to racial whiteness in British colonial North America was the concise, proto-national, and deeply racialized, figure—“Christian”—in permanent and hostile opposition to Native American “savagery” (Roediger 2008: 9, 28).

11. In the aftermath of the reckless occupation of Iraq in 2003, Fukuyama eventually distanced himself from the so-called “neoconservative” movement associated with the Project for a New American Century and became a vocal critic of Bush's policies of apparently failed “nation-building” (see Fukuyama 2004, 2006). Notably, Fukuyama endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president in 2008.