INTRODUCTION

Race/ism is what Patrick Wolfe referred to as “colonialism speaking” (2016: 119-122).  When tracing the historiography of race/ism, one must also trace the development of industrial & finance capital to understand what Sylvia Wynter has called ‘the worlding of the world’.  As Frantz Fanon (2004) argued in Wretched of the Earth, it is the colonist that makes history in the telling of the story that “we made this land”.  Who each differentially racialized group “is” in this epic tale, should not be mistaken for all that they are but rather represents structural mechanisms within the larger social reproduction of systemic domination. Differential racialization is not simply some reflection of cultural and/or phenotypic difference but rather a system of power that typologically orders human bodies in hierarchical reference to other human bodies (Wolfe 2016; Omi and Winant 2015; Roberts 2011).

The institution of Western science is a powerful modern story-telling machine (Haraway 1989).  The same stories of progress and development found in the scientific narratives of natural history can be found in Euro-western claims of ‘modernity’.  How that story is told and who it serves is not something to be taken lightly and the mechanisms of the logics of local, state, federal, national, and international racial regimes must be dynamically interrogated for scholars to present historically, structurally, and ethically informed model of dynamic human ecological systems.  Amidst those mechanisms and missing from mainstream analyses of race/ism is temporality of modernity (stadial theory), space, and land. How do racial regimes then register as representations of past peoples who are categorized as differentially out of place and time?

STADIAL SPACE-TIME & MODERNITY

Missing from the failed critiques of race/ism are socio-historical context, analysis of the temporality of race/ism, and an analysis of space and place.  Time is a central phenomenon, key to the formation of society.  According to sociologist Emile Durkheim, time and space aren’t conceivable without units through which to measure and understand them. Time serves an important regulatory function. Divisions in time are the foundation for making social life possible. Time is a ‘pre-contractual contract’, a Durkheimian notion arguing that before you do anything in society, you have already agreed on a whole lot with people who you have no idea who they are in terms of conceptions of time, space, and language.  Durkheim believed that similar notions of time provided people with a sense of collective consciousness.  Historical sociologist E. P. Thompson’s work reviewed the history of the clock, standardized time, and the disciplinary regulation of workers under industrial capitalism (Thompson 1967).  Different social, economic, and political systems as well as positions have different modes of time.  Social structures are understood here as dynamics between schemas and sets of resources that empower, constrain, and reproduce social action (Sewell 2005:151).

Racial regimes operate off stadial-time, a space-time specific to Euro-western colonial industrial and finance capitalisms.  Historical Sociologist Gurminder Bhambra’s definition of modernity provides a temporal frame but most importantly a social evolution through the demarcation of difference between traditional/pre-modern societies and modern Eurowestern industrial and finance capitalist societies. Such distinctions hang on racial, gendered, sexualized, as well as capitalist meanings and relations that were constructed via Eurowestern colonialism.  These differences give meaning to modernity both ‘spatially and temporally’ (Bhambra 2007:3).  This normative Orientalist worldview is a central fiction in fashioning the story of ‘organic beings’ in the field of biology (Said 1979; Haraway 1989).  Who is introduced into history, when, where, and how is a sociological as well as a biological narrative within the fiction of modernity presenting a set of stories about progress and development while ignoring the colonialism and imperialism required to trialectically generate it.  The position of a society and its people within historical development is a statement about social, political, economic, and biological development, this can be found in the administrative and social importance of colonial calculation found in human demography.

ZOOLOGICAL COMPARTMENTALIZATION

In Urbanizing Frontiers, Penelope Edmond (2010) argues that the spatial positioning between the Aboriginal peoples and the colonial settlement implied “that Aboriginal people are out of time or that their existence is coeval: they reside in another time, which would pass in the wake of the city and its New World progress” (2010: 47).  Stadial theory is a central logic to racial logics and settlement.  Race/ism has a set of temporal as well as spatial logics that places differentially racialized peoples on a developmental scale in deference to the modernity of whiteness.  “…if the city represented the space of modernity and was, indeed, progress itself, then Aboriginal peoples were out of time and space in European understandings of history and philosophy” (Edmonds 2010: 59).  Through zoological typological ordering, colonized peoples are categorized in a temporal frame of: permanently frozen in the past (indigeneity), primitively thwarted out of time (Blackness), or never catching up to whiteness (far and near east orientalism) while the colonizer gets to make the powerful claim that “I AM the Species” (Sahlins 2008:2).

Additionally, it is key to recognize the importance of time in the process of settlement. Stadial theory is key to the narrative of terra nullius, that one is “entitled to land that one has developed” (Edmonds 2010: 57).  Edmonds argues that stadial theory was largely a theory about human socioeconomic modes of production within Enlightenment thought (2010: 57). Enlightenment thought was spatial and temporal.  Lands and the peoples connected to them becomes locked in specific primitivities that place them as always developmentally behind or out of sync or already dead.  Those spatial and temporal differences are registered via race/ism and its co-constitutions with that of Euro-western colonial sexuality and gender (Anderson and Innes 2015; Lugones 2010; Maldonado-Torres 2007).  Those differences are chrono- and geo-political, pointing us to the other forms of colonial subjectivies that come to define what and who ‘is’ part of the Homo Sapien sapiens species and thus how scientific narratives are produced about those lives (Fanon 2004:7; Sahlins 2008).

Race/ism is a doctrine as well as a classificatory and regulatory grid imposed on a variety of colonized populations.  Wolfe (2016) argues that the emergence of race as an ideology was at the same historical moments of shifts from mercantilism to industrial economy and the height of the enlightenment.  Race/ism is then a set of processes that register colonial conflicts, it is through race/ism that colonial ontologies are sustained (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Wolfe 2016).  Lying within stadial time and the Euro-western myth of progress are divisions of land, labor, as well as capital.  Relations to land and the logic of development is key to generating the spatial diving practices between the metropole and the colony, the city and the country, the suburb and the city, the developed and developing worlds.  This scales up and down from the land and space to the bodies on the land reflecting differential statuses from those who aren’t from somewhere else to “transnational somewhere-elses”, formerly enslaved, to the settlers (the ones who carry their sovereignty with them) (Veracini 2010:3; Wolfe 2016).  Race/ism is inseparable from place as a dynamic social division of labor masquerading as a fixed natural division of labor.

Making the other requires calculation and mapping/scaling.  Calculability is key to rendering the political problems into simple technical ailments (Mitchell 2002; Mbembe 2003; Li 2007).  The relationships between mapping and governmentality are no different from the relationships between ‘geographic ancestry’ and governmentality.  Race/ism is the fusion of social reproduction to that of biological reproduction.  Just as geographic spaces are organized for empire, so are bodies, and genes.  Hence, the importance of statistics to mapping for state and empire is clearly the same importance that statistics has to mapping people via genomic and genetic analysis.  “For many postcolonial governments, this ability to rearrange the natural and social environment became a means to demonstrate the strength of the modern state as a techno-economic power” (Mitchell 2002).  Race/ism then registers as “colonialism speaking” (2016: 119).  As a system of compartmentalization, race/ism as a process generates a regulatory “geographical and classification” (Fanon 2004:3).  It is through hereditarianism that sociopolitical groupings biologically reproduce “others” defined in reference to the normative benchmark of humanity: the civilized cisheterosexual middle class white man.  Science of biology is a tool to be used to understand and investigate the natural world as well as an individual or society’s place with in it. As stated by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, “The description of the evolution of biological systems is a mirror of the supposed evolution of modern bourgeois society” (1985: 22). Biology operates as the key mechanism that naturalizes socio-political inequity as a temporal relationship between stages of development and society towards that of Eurowestern civilization.

Racial/ist taxonomy is always a statement about “progress”, using biology as ideology to achieve the objectives of Eurocolonialism. Race/ism is a doctrine of dividing practices that regulates breeding, the spatial distribution of bodies, physical, social, political, and economic interactions and relations.  Following this further, the anti-miscegenation logics of U.S. racial regimes can here the superstructure lies in these models and when we conceptualize organisms interacting across/in any space we do so as a diacritical relation to human superstructure (social structures and cultural schemas) (Sewell 2005).  This Wright model then does not only describe dispersal distance variance but also the model for designing and policing space which follow the patterns and logics of settlement and the post-Civil War logics of racial control maintained via residential segregation in the United States (Veracini 2010; Nightengale 2012).  This understanding of race/ism as a space-time then provides a different vantage point through which to understand segregation ordinances like the one passed by Mayor J. Barry Mahool in 1910 that divided every street in Baltimore, Maryland into colored blocks and white blocks and fined residents who moved onto a block set for the opposite race (Nightengale 2012). This spatial dividing practice also structures where institutional resources and infrastructures go, those racial logics are then also spatial logics speaking of past geo-politics that modern borders are used to keep colonized in their proper socio-political as well as physical space (Mbembe 2003; Fanon 2004).

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