Fusing Race: The Phobogenics of Racializing Surveillance

Abstract

This paper sets up a framework to assess how purportedly passive state surveillance comprises an infrastructure of active racialization. Frantz Fanon's concept of "racial phobogenics," or the process of making a raced body into an object of anxiety, can be useful for scholarship at the intersection of communication, race, data, security, policing, affect, and biopolitics. To read how local state surveillance justifies the aggregation of data by means of phobogenics, I analyzed 120 hours of field observations and conducted fourteen interviews from June 2017 to March 2018 in one US Homeland Security Fusion Center, part of the integrated intelligence system and national security strategy after 9/11. I argue that Fusion Centers' use of "situational awareness," the trained ability to know what is deemed "suspicious" in everyday life, fuses race or taxonomizes what is out of place and what is inflammatory according to nonconscious racializing affects. I therefore urge for a critical scholarship that attends to "prelogical rationality and affectivity" (Fanon 1986: 133) as exercises of power. This paper offers a conceptual framework for analyzing the anxiety-based racialization of suspects as part of the routine operation of US Homeland Security Fusion Centers. Such a framework will detail that racism, the rendering of raced bodies as out of place, is an immanent part of the melding of police, military, and national security intelligence. Toward cultivating a horizontal consciousness of information that augments war operations and domestic policing, the seventy-nine current Fusion Centers in the United States combine older technologies like on-the-ground human intelligence collection and Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) paper forms with newer technologies like online watch centers, spatial mapping technology, data-mining algorithms, and information networks. The US Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security define fusion as the process of "turning information and intelligence into actionable knowledge" (US