SOCB53H3 Lecture 3: Week 3 Reader notes
Document Summary
This scientific cloak of racial knowledge, its formal character and seeming universality, imparts authority and legitimation to it. Its authority is identical with, it parasitically maps onto the formal authority of the scientific discipline it mirrors. At the same time, racial knowledge- racial science, to risk excess- is able to do this because it has been historically integral to the emergence of these authoritative scientific fields. Race has been a basic categorical object in some cases a founding focus of scientific analysis in these various domains. Power is exercised epistemologically in the dual practices of naming and evaluating. In naming or refusing to name things in the order of thought, existence is recognized or refused, significance assigned or ignored, and beings elevated or rendered invisible. Production of the racialized other, then, establishes a library or archive of information, a set of guiding ideas and principles about otherness: a mind, characteristic behavior or habits, and predictions of likely responses.
