Conclusion: The Many-Headed Hydra

The book concludes by sketching the last century of the inner life of race, from the Cold War’s quilting point of anticommunism, to that of antiterrorism under neoliberal globalization, and returning finally to the current moment when the dangerous inner life attaches centrally neither to communism nor terrorism, but reflects instead a crisis of neoliberal globalization marked by the rise of right-wing populisms. Racial threat has proliferated into a many-headed hydra, inclusive of dangerous people of color, malevolent Islamic terrorists, amoral Jewish financiers, seditious parties, and all manner of secretly contaminated selves, snakes who poison and wound the national body politic. The book closes with two ways of implementing its lessons in racial ensoulment: first, an abolitionist approach that dismantles the technologies of enmity and policing; and second, a reparative approach that replaces the politics of suspicion with practices that forges new forms of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid.