The Racial Infrastructure of the Terror-Industrial Complex

This essay draws on ethnographic research in a Pakistani neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, to illuminate how the concepts of becoming and infrastructure reveal insights into racialization and the workings of the counterterror state. I discuss the concepts of racial becoming and racial infrastructure in the context of the terror-industrial complex, which implements technologies of policing as part of the state and toward a range of community-based approaches in the nonprofit industry. By drawing attention to the concepts of racial becoming and racial infrastructure, this intervention asks what the assumptions are of the recent theorizations of becoming, potentials, infrastructure, and terror in relationship to racism and white supremacy. In considering terror as a racial formation of becoming and infrastructure, the author argues that much is to be gained in terms of theorizing power, hierarchy, domination, the potential of innovation in everyday life, and the possibility of collective struggle.