Readings summary, WHITE ORDER: Racialization of Public Space in the Netherlands.

WHITE ORDER: Racialization of Public Space in the Netherlands.

Dealing with state apparatus, administration, execution.

The language of the argumentation by the State in different fields.

Anti-Blackness And Disavowed Spatial Violence On The Outsider/Intruder

p6: a bureaucratic apparatus that regulates the processes of exclusion and “the extent to which these are presented as acceptable or even legitimate.” Racism and bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt notes, are intimately connected.

Allochtoon, a common term in Dutch social management, political discourse and colloquial language, is used to categorize a person born abroad, or a “person of whom at least one parent was born abroad.

[…] a “characteristic showing with which country someone actually is closely related given their own country of birth and that of their parents.”

p7: Both Allochtoon and Autochtoon suggest a fusion of body, soil, water, air, and sun, and this amalgam gives rise to a geomorphic body.

[…] only Allochtoon that carries the trace of dirt, or—to put it more bluntly—dirtiness.

p8: […] the enclave is constituted by fencing the Black body within. As a bodily marker, the enclave is not only encountered in a fixed space, but moves along with the racialized body.

“Black bodies can be employed in strategies that create spaces that are transferable and transportable.”

The Allochtoon is matter out of place, […], or an ‘enemy’s territory,’ that is to be annexed — joined to the nation, but in a subordinate capacity.

Homogeneity as a desire of the state. (quote: ethno-geographical desire)

p6: Racism is directly link to bureaucracy. (Arend quote)

p8: transportable black body as a problem.

The Language Of Care

p10: Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgeois warn us in Introduction: Making Sense of Violence that, (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, 4)“the most violent acts consist of conduct that is socially permitted, encouraged, or enjoined as a moral right or duty.” We must pay careful attention to the language of ‘care,’ ‘liveability,’ and renewal that is being deployed in the Netherlands.

‘Care’ in this context comes with strings attached. Moreover, some populations are a priori excluded from biopolitical care, or what passes for ‘care’ is, in fact, covert surveillance, at best, and eugenics, at worst.

The aim of the municipal “intervention teams” is twofold: enforcement and care.

Intervention Teams are explicitly deployed to take back, reclaim, and reconquer “security risk areas” in order to ‘improve liveability.

The Politics Of Liveability

In the Dutch government’s ‘liveability programme’ we read that: “Problem families are characterised by a number of issues, such as debt, unemployment and poor parenting.” The underlying message is that those who are identified as ‘anti-social’ render public space (their neighborhoods) unlivable. A cause for great concern is this new form of state intervention, which is now being conceptualized as a public-private partnership, that stretches by way of a “Behind the Front Door approach” (Achter de Voordeur Aanpak) into the hitherto ‘private’ life of ‘anti-social’ citizens. In Protocol Home visits Urban and Municipal Intervention Rotterdam, a document issued by the municipality of Rotterdam, the writers state that, “The intervention team has a complex set of tasks. They intervene in the vital worlds of citizens: physical world, living space, world of work, financial, social and emotional world.” ‘Deviant’ populations are perceived as redeemable, or recuperable, only inasmuch as they display the desire for normality by cooperating.

As ontologically expansive, white people tend to act and think as if all spaces—whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise—are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish. Ontological expansiveness is a particular co-constitutive relationship between self and environment in which the self assumes that it can and should have total mastery over its environment.

White ontological expansiveness was the very motor of settler colonialism that drove the violent incursion of Europeans into native peoples’ territory for exploitation, and materialization of the frontier.

The Racial Calculus: Price Tagging Black Life

p16: As such, ‘quality of life,’ which is associated with the good, proper life full of possibility, is life that is already coded as White.

p17: Some lives are scripted as ‘poor in possibility’ (kansarm), while others are imagined as ‘rich in possibility’(kansrijk).

PVV: allochtoon – cost and value of lifes

p17: Lives ‘poor in possibility’ are lives that are not “registered as liveable,” unless

‘improved’ upon.

P18: White lives are ‘full of chance’ whereas Black lives are overdetermined

(not on structural level, but bodily, morally intrinsic).

p19: For the maintenance of the national myth of a human and humane society, the Netherlands must keep the nonbeing out of sight. What separates the Human from non-beings is their “humanitarian” efforts, the ‘empathetic’ or ‘humane’ relationship with those in the zone of nonbeing.

The Language of Reasonableness

p20: On the surface, the desire for order assumes an air of reasonableness, or

pragmatism, which renders racial issues into non-issues through rational dialogue and

accommodation. Any sign of ‘unreasonableness,’ any contamination by and of the

senses, is exorcised.

‘Reasonability’ appeals to a supposed shared positionality and a shared chance and aspiration to locate oneself ‘in the middle.’ However, ‘reasonability,’ we argue, is predicated on an economy of constraint. The realm of supposedly shared meanings shape policies via a ‘consensus’ that positions certain populations as always-already at odds with the status quo—they are always-already seen as failing to follow the ‘rules of engagement.’