Introduction

Abstract

Through a reading of Donald Trump’s use of the song “The Snake” to campaign about the dangers of America’s multiple racial enemies—Latin American migrants, Muslim “terrorists,” Jewish financiers, among others—the introduction argues that racisms of the color line share something with Islamophobia and antisemitism: they are all organized biopolitically around a probabilistic threat of evil presumed to dwell in the inner life of certain populations. The introduction argues that racial power operates as a game for managing bodies in order to expose the potential malevolence that hides within the souls they contain. This policing process enacts a hermeneutics of suspicion and relies upon a form of anxious reason with both a universalizing and a particularizing racial action. This presumption of threat to and by the soul is crucial for explaining the “anti” quality that we find in racisms: in anti-Blackness, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and even anticommunism.