Analytics of Raciality / Analítica de Racialidade: Political-Symbolic Processes of Racial Power

This chapter challenges the centrality of the logic of exclusion—the view that race is politically and socially significant only when race identification is explicitly or implicitly used to justify discrimination—in the understanding of race injustice. It explores the political-symbolic processes that have produced the mechanisms of racial power, of which police brutality is a most dramatic example. To elaborate this critique of the logic of exclusion, the chapter discusses the newspaper account of an episode of police terror in a favela of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Chacina de Vigário Geral reveals this form of race injustice produced in an analytic of raciality. To grasp the power-effects raciality manifested in police brutality demands an approach that goes beyond the view of race as a mechanism of exclusion.