The book, Race and National Security, edited by Professor Matiangai V. S. Sirleaf, of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, offers us a historic opportunity to change our political imaginary. This book delivers on its promise to “fully excavate[] the question of how race and racism relate to national security domestically, transnationally[,] and internationally.” In the words of Walter White, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929–1955:
Race discrimination threatens our national security. We can no longer afford to let the most backward sections of our population endanger our country by persisting in discriminating practices. We must meet the challenge of our neighbors, not only because discrimination is immoral, but also because it is dangerous.
Although White’s critique continues to be true today, in the context of the broader conversation on national security, it is now clear that White’s focus on discrimination provides an insufficient framework. One of the many achievements of Race and National Security is that it centers a framework not of discrimination, but rather of racial justice, one that focuses on addressing institutional racism and anti-subordination. The growing general focus on racial justice, both on a national and a global scale, coupled with the continuous resistance against established racial norms, justifies the book’s deliberate examination of these issues and serves as the driving force behind this book. The authors contributing to the volume look at national security law as complicit in furthering systemic inequality from an anti-subordination positionality. They illustrate practices and policies that, whether by intent or effect, enforce the subjugated social status of historically oppressed communities within societies across the globe under the protective umbrella of national security. Thanks to their work, we are now able to draw interesting connections among the various ways these racial injustices work.
Race and National Security also serves to fill a void in approaches to international law. Scholars like James Thuo Gathii, featured in the anthology, have been arguing for some time that race and identity have so far been “underemphasized, understudied, and undertheorized” in mainstream international law.1 Just as the institution of slavery dehumanized black communities, situating them as beyond the scope of humanity at the founding of the United States, Euro-heteropatriarchal international law has served as a tool to dehumanize indigenous and non-European populations, and, as a consequence, mark them as unworthy of self-sovereignty in the worst cases or as incapable of self-government in the best. Race and National Security displays many of the connections across historical eras and diverse geographical locations, revealing recurring and structural patterns that include policing, incarceration and border policies in the United States, extrajudicial killings in Palestine, technology of war and surveillance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the complicity of international organizations like the International Criminal Court and the United Nations.
The first chapter—an Introduction by Sirleaf—sets the stage and argues how international law has failed to see and engage with race by obscuring the role of racism and White supremacy in national security as if “hidden in plain sight.” It contends that the reconceptualization of national security is required and demonstrates how race structures national security. This chapter also clarifies why centering subordinated groups is necessary. It maintains that a racial justice approach requires consideration of macro-structural processes that facilitate racial subordination and stratification in national security as opposed to focusing on discrete episodes of individual discrimination.
The second section of the book—“Why Race & National Security”—addresses the need to engage in a discussion about race, national security, and what the scope of that conversation should entail. Here, the authors—James Gathii, Catherine Powell, and Aziz Rana—present how the racist origin story of the United States plays out in decisions from those involving national security law and colonialism to those involving pandemic policies. In the third section of the book—“Race & The Scope of National Security”—Monica Bell, Andrea Armstrong, and Jaya Ramji-Nogales offer contributions that weave together policing of black bodies, mass incarceration, and the eternal foreignness of black and brown immigrants in the United States to answer unequivocally the question of whose national security the state is protecting.
In the fourth section of Race and National Security, and maybe my favorite—“Race & The Boomerang Effect of National and Transnational Security”— contributors Asli Bâli, Noura Erakat, and Margaret Hu contemplate how national security methods of repression developed for “over there” migrate back to the metropolis to be deployed on those othered internally. This section highlights how colonies and other subordinated territories are used as laboratories for repressive techniques and technologies that are later used against marginalized communities in the metropolis. These techniques and technologies include not only tanks and weapons now used against antiracist activists in the United States, but also biometric data gathering.
In the fifth section—“Comparative and International Perspectives on Race & National Security”— Yuvraj Joshi, Rachel Lopez and Adelle Blackett investigate what redress and remedies might entail when race and racial justice are centered in national security by turning to comparative and international perspectives. The final reflection, a conclusion by Sirleaf, considers what it would mean to reimagine national security and the reach of the security state.
Race and National Security will help set the stage for upcoming generations of activist students and lawyers to implement a different approach to national security in a way that can point towards a post-subordination future.
- James Thuo Gathii, Writing Race and Identity in a Global Context: What CRT and TWALL Can Learn From Each Other, 67 UCLA L. Rev. 1610, 1610 (2021).
