Racial experience and knowing the political in liberal democracies

ABSTRACT

Liberal democracies politicize racist incidents at the expense of institutionalizing antiracist ideologies through party politics. This article is concerned with how racial experience shapes how people come to ‘know the political’ in Ceuta, a Spanish city on the Spanish-Moroccan borderland. Knowing the political is an embodied form of subjectivity that makes meaningful sense out of governmental politics as an extension of social life. After examining racial experiences in the lives of Muslim politicians and their supporters, the article examines how the UDCE, a political party primarily composed of Muslims, practices and articulates political ideologies shaped by their experiences as Muslims in Ceuta. Popular and political reactions to the UDCE’s political interventions reveal social unease with racialized peoples conducting political affairs as racialized peoples. This unease, in turn, is rooted in broader sociocultural and historical processes that exclude racial experience from the core practices and ideologies of liberal democratic governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial experience
• racial liberalism
• political ideology
• liberal democracy
• anti-racism
• Ceuta

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [#0451681] and research funds from St. Mary’s College (Notre Dame, IN)