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I appreciate the thrust of this piece about how analogies about white supremacy/nationalism obscure the problem at hand, but it doesn't consider the issues of relying on disease pathology to describe political ailments (which it deploys freely throughout) https://www.wired.com/story/white-nationalism-is-far-worse-than-a-disease/
"Much like the effects of trisomy-21, say, racism might be managed but not fully repaired or excised."
Trisomy-21 is Down's Syndrome. This is really ableist. It feels really troubling to think about white supremacy as a "birth defect" even if it speaks to foundational issues.
Trisomy-21 is Down's Syndrome. This is really ableist. It feels really troubling to think about white supremacy as a "birth defect" even if it speaks to foundational issues.
The thing about disease pathology is how, within the paradigm of surveillance medicine, managing one's health (which now exists on a spectrum of constant vigilance and maintenance) becomes a reflection of one's goodness and deservingness of citizenship, care, respect, etc.
This absolutely cannot be the way we think about a country or the inequity that defines it. Racism is not "cancer," and it's widespreadness is not a "metastatic" illness to which anti-racism is the cure; intergenerational racism is not a "germline mutation."
How does reliance on disease pathology require us to naturalize the existence of the nation-state as, by default, a body in harmony that is contaminated and made ill by the pathogen of white supremacy? Has the nation-state *ever* been a harmonious political arrangement?
And also, @Ethnography911 and others have brilliantly talked about the collapsing of public health into securitization/militarization discourses (eg "war on COVID") -- how do these animate and pervert how we simultaneously think about the body and/within the state?
What is gained from "white nationalism as pathology" rather than Charles Mills' (and others!) conception of white supremacy at the core of the social contract, i.e. racism as foundational feature vs. foundational *flaw*?
The piece is a critique of analogies of racism (presumably alluding to comparisons to Nazism?) that uses biomedicalized analogies of racism that are equally obscuring and harmful because of how they posit an understanding of healthfulness and the body.
Repair of the body is generally held as an individual thing. But health, as w the maintenance of democracy, must necessarily be collective: we can only be truly healthy people when we live in health-affirming environments.
These frames, I think, are in conflict with one another.
These frames, I think, are in conflict with one another.
This remains one of my favorite pieces about memetic analogies: how they flatten and deny historical possibility, how they nurture memory that is reductive, competitive, and zero-sum (as opposed to robust and multidirectional -- s/o to Michael Rothberg!) https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/like-memetic-analogies-in-social-media/?fbclid=IwAR27bTwEvzkHwBHBluzQ9P-tqi852Rv3N7__yGL4D42TsLrLjkJc18hfRqg
