Whiteness as War by Other Means: Racial Complexity in an Age of Failed States

Abstract

This paper examines contemporary debates around the US Census, US National Security Strategy, and various documents of postmodern war doctrine to delineate a mutation in domestic social order that is consistent both with the end of civil rights and with US planetary ambition. At one level this paper serves to critique a liberal progressive-activist tendency in the US that remains preoccupied with the very racial oppositions that such a tendency also ironically condemns. The contemporary juridical ethos finds its political analogue not in a post-white “cosmopolitan legal order,” as many would hope, but in the new absolutism of `World-American' rule. At a second level, then, this paper seeks to complicate and challenge US planetary ambition by describing what is ultimately an autogenic form of warfare, a declaration within civil society of a war between the US and itself. The pervasive fractalization of civil rights based forms of domestic social order, and equally, the new minoritarian condition of whiteness, provide apposite bases from within which to rethink race politics in an age of failed states.