Diversity, Temporality, Population: The Securitization of the Democratic Pastorate and the Rise of the Racial Liberal Security State

Reading across the domains of disciplinary knowledge formations, public educational initiatives, governmental documentation, and social movement discourses, this dissertation examines emergent meanings of security as the antiracist renovation of the liberal tradition conjoins with questions of social and national security during the U.S. “encounter with totalitarianism” in the years leading up to WWII. In the development of the ethnicity paradigm in the social sciences, the principles of neutrality that governed the administration of New Deal state programming, and the advent and proliferation of public and private educational initiatives to promote cultural pluralism, this dissertation identifies and traces a series of interrelated and co-constitutive “racial security logics” that create new parameters of intelligibility (and governance) for subjects of and for a purportedly antiracist state. The purportedly antiracist state form that liberal progressive narratives claim is achieved later during what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have famously referred to as “the period of the racial break,” is a state form that is simultaneously imagined as “achieved” and perpetually “coming into being” in the postwar period. This dissertation locates and names the material and epistemic preconditions for this shift in the immediate prewar period. Central to this new state form coming into being, I argue, was the production of a progressive telos for the nation that both constructed racial liberals as a “democratic pastorate” and conducted them as mangers of the general population to work toward the “common good” of a progressive, inclusive future secured through the monitoring, surveillance, and policing of the disorganizing potentialities of race. Through the securitization of the democratic pastorate, a new form of state rationality developed that could secure both a still thoroughly racialized stratified population, as well new material relations for the racial state, while simultaneously disavowing those relations of violence through the rise of race relations knowledge industries. At its core, this dissertation examines how the U.S. racial liberal state state extended and transformed its modes of racial violence precisely through purportedly antiracist progressive social, political, and intellectual movements that understood liberal progress as the achievement of cultural identity through the universalizing rubrics of procedural neutrality and inclusive diversity.