The 13th Amendment of the US Constitution is a notable example of how racial interpellation can be enacted in surreptitious ways. In 1865, President Lincoln amended the constitution to abolish slavery, but it contained a loophole: “except as a punishment for crime…” Here in NZ, our most recent deputy Prime Minister, Paula Bennett, controversially stated that some people have ‘fewer human rights’ than others.
Both the 13th Amendment and Paula Bennett’s comment, in context, are loaded with race and class undertones: impoverished black or brown people are – or tend to be, according to some – criminals. As such, their human rights should be minimised, or swept away altogether, through the state apparatus of punishment and imprisonment.
Both Stuart Hall and Louis Althusser, through concepts of interpellation and subjectivity, place class and race as social constructs that we accept as norms through ideological apparatuses, such as in media representations: those who are not white, and who sit economically below the middle classes, are relationally inferior as subjects within capitalist society.
[Warning: Video contains some explicitly bad language.]
Black culture is ‘thug life’, and Maori are violent. These stereotypes are imagined into being through popular culture’s exploitation for pure capitalistic aims, and through news media reportage that plays well to political aims. The convergence of the economic and the political into modern neoliberal ideology, supported by new media technologies, makes the production and reproduction of subjectivities of aspiration or exclusion appear as ‘common sense’. Poor people and coloured people are more likely to be subjects of exclusion, and wealthier white people are aspirational for their looks and social status. In other words, as Althusser states in his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses text, subjects are “defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject”.
Through repetition of mediated representation into common stereotypes, “obviousness” is imposed: poor and/or coloured people are uncivilised outsiders, probably dishonest, and should be treated as such. They are not deserving of full cultural citizenship, of all human rights, nor of the freedoms or rewards of neoliberal ideology and its emphasis on wealth and white beauty. What’s more, the violence inherent in negative stereotypes and the systems that support such beliefs, become – ideologically – the fault of those who are most harmed by them. Just ask Metiria Turei. Or maybe James Baldwin.