4. Race and Crime
4.4 Race and Racialisation Today
Dr. Michael Ma
In addition to the history and practice of colonialism, we can also examine race as an everyday operation or as a common mental shortcut whereby a person’s physical appearance becomes a stand-in for appraising how they act, think, feel or exist in society. We can understand such mental shortcuts as stereotypes or unconscious biases that are used to arrive at an assessment based on appearance (e.g., skin colour, facial features, and/or hair texture). We can understand these judgments, opinions, and actions as things that people “do” to others.
Race as an Action
First, we can understand “race” as a verb or an act that is “done” to someone in that people or subjects can be “racialised” by a person, an act, or a system. This act assigns an individual, based on observed or assumed somatic, phenotypical differences, to a particular racial category that operates in a society. In this regard, race is a practice. For example, in the context of Shereen Hassan’s experience of being denied entry into the United States, we can understand that she was racialised by a system of border control (e.g., post-911 Homeland Security or the United Nations’ no-fly list) that uses race as a form of identification. Although Hassan’s first problematic encounter with border officials was before the events of 911 and before the establishment of heightened American security and border control, we can still understand her ongoing identification as a person of interest as being related to her racialised identity; the post-911 environment just increased the scrutiny. Her name and description are forms of identification that match another name and description of a person of interest to American border security services. In this regard, her matching name and description are not racist in nature because they are simply a match. However, we can understand that the reason for the production of such lists and databases is the outcome of a racialised post-911 heightened security and border control culture that specifically targets names that have a Middle Eastern, non-Western, and/or Islamic religious connection. “Hassan” as a proper noun racialises a person because of its non-Western linguistic origins. It is in this regard that Shereen Hassan was racialised. She was not denied entry because she was not White, but rather because she has a specific kind of non-Western name that was of interest to border security in the context of heightened post-911 securitisation. She was denied entry because border officials were now using a race-based system of screening. It should be noted that the Canadian passport has no specific racial identification except for the photograph and place of birth. In this regard, the passport is not specifically racist nor racialising, but it does provide information that allows for negative or harmful racialisation on the part of post-911 border security operations and practices (Amery, 2013; Chebe