Sherene Razack
Professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

"How is white supremacy embodied? : An Educator's View on Abu Ghraib"
Lecture: Thursday, April 21, 2005
Communications 226
5:30 pm
Reception to follow

"Everyday Indianism, Orientalism and Africanism"
Workshop: Friday April 22, 2005
Communincations 202
1:00 pm
Space in the workshop is limited, so please RSVP at 206.543.3920 or afahale@u.washington.edu

The sense of self required by systems of domination is a self that is
experienced in relation to the subordinate other, a relationship that
is deeply sexualized. Educators at all levels have a responsibility to
critically reflect on how their practices influence the formation of
such a sense of self and how that contributes to the ways white
supremacy is embodied in the classroom and other sites of encounter.
In her talk Sherene Razack hopes to invite such critical reflection
through her theorizing of the torture at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, she
asks, if violence is required to make the colour line, how is this
violence enacted both in encounters such as Abu Ghraib, and others that
are often held to be the very opposite: mundane, ordinary encounters
between whites and racial Others in the classroom and elsewhere?

Despite determined efforts to view the torture instrumentally, that is
as having a military function, the sex in the acts of torture at Abu
Ghraib, Guantanamo and other places does not easily go away. Three
questions persist about the Abu Ghraib photos: why the photos? Why so
many of them? Why the sex? (This last question is often connected to
the question of women’s participation.) In her talk, Professor Razack
proposes a framework for understanding what went on at Abu Ghraib by
addressing these three questions and offering an interlocking approach
to understanding violence.

Drawing from her study of the violence Western peacekeepers have
enacted against racialized peoples on virtually every Western
peacekeeping mission to date, Like the violence of occupation,
peacekeeping violence enacted by white militaries is openly practiced,
sexualized, and recorded in photos and videos and in diaries. As she
has shown for Canada’s own prisoner abuse scandal, the ‘Somalia
Affair,’ these are acts of racial violence, sexualized and enacted as a
performance of gender. It is through the sexual that racial power is
violently articulated and it is through this violence that men and
women come to know themselves as gendered members of a superior race.
Razack argues that these are acts of racial violence, sexualized and
enacted as a performance of gender. She asserts that it is through the
sexual that racial power is violently articulated and it is through
this violence that men and women come to know themselves as gendered
members of a superior race.

The Abu Ghraib photos reveal the racial fault line of the ‘new world
order,’ the colour line Dubois described one hundred years ago where
white nations are lined up on one side and Dubois’ “darker races” are
on the other. Colour lines require a great deal of racial (sexualized
and gendered) violence and if we are to disrupt them we will need to
understand not only how violence is required to make the colour line
but how ‘ordinary’ people come to participate in its creation and
maintenance. Professor Razack focuses on how race, class, gender and
sexuality underwrite each other in moments of public racial violence.
While one system (here it is white supremacy) provides the entry point
for the discussion (language is after all successive), what is
immediately evident as one pursues how white supremacy is embodied, is
that individuals come to know themselves within masculinities and
femininities.

Sherene Razack is Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies in
Education at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in the
area of race and gender issues in the law. Her most recent book Dark
Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New
Imperialism (2004) is an examination of the violence of Canadian
peacekeepers in Somalia and an exploration of the role of law in
violence enacted on racialized bodies in the new world order. Previous
books include Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and
Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (1998) and Canadian Feminism and
the Law: The Women's Legal and Education Fund and the Pursuit of
Equality (1991). She has also published articles on Canadian national
mythologies and immigration policies of the 1990s, race, space and
prostitution, and gendered racism. Before obtaining her Ph.D. in
education she worked in the area of human rights, teaching trade
unionists, community activists, legal practitioners, government
employees, teachers and students on a variety of social justice issues.

*Excerpts from the texts below will be the foundation for the workshop*
Register for the workshop & pick up your copies at the Simpson Center

Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair,
Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism. (Intro and Chapter One.) Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2004. 2-50.

Renee L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American
Subjects. Hanover, NH: U Press of New England, 2000. 1-48.

Saidiya V. Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in 19th Century America. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1997. 17-23.

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1992. 2-28.

The series was put on with the support of the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Graduate School Fund for Excellence and Innovation, in addition to support from the Departments of English, Comparative Literature and Women Studies.

[Follow link for more on Sherene Razack]

Follow links below for more articles by Sherene Razack:

[When is Prisoner Abuse Racial Violence?]

[Sherene Razack, editor of Race, Space and the Law:
Unmapping a White Settler Society, in conversation with Zoë Druick]

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