Introduction
For more than a decade political theorists have responded to Du Bois’s famous claim that
“the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” by paying particular
attention to how race figures into key political concepts like democracy, contract, freedom, and
For political theorists interested in race, racial justice must become a primary concern
of democratic theory and politics, particularly in the United States. While the efforts to move
race closer to the center of political theory are laudable and long overdue, they focus largely on
race as a historical injustice, rendering the problem of the color line an issue of correcting past
wrongs. The question that emerges from much of the literature on race and political theory is
what kind of historical consciousness does democracy require?
essential to an anti-racist democratic politics, does not offer a complete picture of how “the
problem of the color line” structures political life, particularly political life in post-civil rights
America.
In this paper, I explore how Michel Foucault’s articulation of racism as a form of
biopolitical violence might alter the way we view “the problem of the color line” in post-civil
rights America. Although Foucault is not celebrated as a theorist of race and racism, his concept
of power lends itself to a unique elaboration of racism, one that is particularly useful in a post-
civil rights context. Foucault’s analysis of racism constitutes a different reading of “the problem
of the color line” in two significant ways. First, Foucault gives us a conceptual vocabulary to
discuss what “the problem of the color line” looks like in post-civil rights America. By
dismantling legalized racism—i.e. a system of racism whereby the state formally sanctioned
racial oppression through legal policies like segregation—the civil rights movement complicated
the process of conceptualizing and identifying racism beyond blatant displays of hostility and
2
Convention