Race and Racialization

Abstract Racialization involves the production and justification of hierarchies of difference through appeals to notions of superiority and inferiority. This chapter considers multiple views of racialization, ranging from accounts of racial formation, intersectionality, matrices of domination, and assemblages to analyses of colonialism, enslavement, and capitalist accumulation by dispossession. In contrast to discredited biological notions of race, it draws attention to processes of racialization that are orchestrated through state policies and practices that subordinate, marginalize, and exclude particular groups while securing the dominance of other groups. The final section of the chapter examines violent racialization in the form of abusive and lethal policing practices, which are best understood as state terror that establishes the parameters of permissible hate.