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First, a few working definitions: race, as I understand it, is an effect of racism. The idea of race came into being as a means of organizing social relations in order to establish and maintain political and economic domination. Racial categories assume meaning over time through ongoing interplays of political, economic, cultural, and social forces. Likewise, through collective intellectual, political, cultural, and spiritual action, racialized groups can redetermine the meaning of the identities imposed on them.1
The best definition of racism I have encountered belongs to geographer Ruth Gilmore. Racism, she writes, is "the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies" (261). Gilmore's definition is pivotal in that it focuses not on how race is imagined or intended by white people but rather on how it is experienced by people of color. People of color experience racism as a set of political and economic conditions that compromise the quality or the longevity of their lives. The word "vulnerability" seems to me to convey quite powerfully the compound quotidian costs of survival under these political conditions.
I have also been influenced by the definition of whiteness propounded by Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey, and other scholars affiliated with the Race Traitor project. The first paragraph of their charter statement reads: "The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them" (9). In exchange for their complicity with a system that compromises the life chances of people of color, "white" people gain privileged access to resources. "Whiteness" is experienced as a form of property, as social, political, economic, and cultural capital.2 Racialization into dominance degrades the humanity of socalled white people, while racialization into exploitation endangers the life chances of people of color. Consequently, race is never just a neutral social fact or an inert historical condition. Academic discussions of race are always embedded in and shaped by the broad array of historical forces and movements...