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From Scientific Racism To Neoliberal Biopolitics, Ladelle Mcwhorter Jan 2017

From Scientific Racism To Neoliberal Biopolitics, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Genealogy does not pose as political motivation, let alone moral imperative. It is a tool for those already engaged in resistance-not to dictate action but to enrich ongoing processes of analyzing and strategizing. With that understanding of genealogy's role, as I have argued (McWhorter 2009) and will argue here, Foucault's method can be extremely useful for confronting racism. In particular, his concepts of normalization and biopower are crucial for understanding how racism survived the demise of the nineteenth-century science that supported it and how it persisted throughout the twentieth century despite social, political, and economic change.


Practicing Practicing, Ladelle Mcwhorter Jan 2004

Practicing Practicing, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"There is something ludicrous in philosophical discourse," Michel Foucault writes, "when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it... " (Foucault 1985, 9). In our age of moral relativism and multiculturalism, it is easy to hear in this sentence a simple condemnation of intellectuals who pose as authorities on questions of belief, and it is all too easy to agree; yes, of course, we ought not tell other people what to think. But given the issues, directions, and investments of Foucault's work, especially in The Use of …