“So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.”
― Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
― Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
“I hate the word homophobia. It's not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole.”
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“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
― Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
― Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
“often, if disabled people somehow succeed, either our disabilities or our accommodations are questioned.”
― We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation
― We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation
“The preservation of individualism—of either type—has historically required the suppression of less privileged voices. The unacknowledged social underpinning of both forms of individualism is caste, privilege, and exclusivity.”
― Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship
― Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship
Russell’s 2025 Year in Books
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