Racialization and Exclusion

The secularization, as modernity, of the historical project of Christianity emerges from the hand of a particular and provincial way of understanding science, it is about the pattern of foundational knowledge of westernized science. A pattern that constitutes the emergence of “new" forms of naming the Other, forms that will no longer come from an explicit theology, but from one that is hidden under the projector mantle of “scientific" theory. It is, then, a process in which the theological dehumanization of the non-European-Western will assume the face of the scientificity, thus, the emergence both the historical, anthropological, sociological, economic, biological discipline (among others), will allow to justify this dehumanization of a historical system in force until our days. If for the first dehumanization, the soul was the central question, for the second will be the idea of race. The invention of race and racism are inseparable processes.
In this sense, the fight against racism is not merely confronting a contingency, but consists of confronting the articulating, structuring and structural principle of the historical project of Christianity, that which in its secular moment we call modernity. The fight against racism, meanwhile, confronting modernity and its intrinsic coloniality, requires reviewing the trajectories that make possible the naturalization of this historical project, for it must (among others) clarify the present distinctions between racism, racial discrimination and racialization. Traditionally, the celebratory discourse of modernity has pointed out that the problem of racism is not an intrinsic problem of racism. In this discourse, racism is presented as an anomaly that will only be overcome when modernity is complete. That is to say, this is neither a principle nor a consequence of modernity, but on the contrary the realization of the modern project would be the necessary way for its disappearance. That is why nation-states, especially after the civil rights struggles in the United States, and fleeing any association with the NAZI experience, began in the second half of the 20th century to produce anti-racist statements in the form of policies aimed at countering racial discrimination. Armed with the Jacobin spirit that permeates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the national States assumed the need to open space to achieve formal equality between individuals of different racial origins, in this trajectory the progressive incorporation in the censuses of race, as an ethnic component, has been fundamental for the pretension to show themselves as States open to combat racial discrimination.
Armed with the Jacobin spirit that permeates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the national States assumed the need to open space to achieve formal equality between individuals of different racial origins, in this trajectory the progressive incorporation in the censuses of race, as an ethnic component, has been fundamental for the pretension to show themselves as States open to combat racial discrimination. In Venezuela, and in recent times, this has meant the enactment of a law to combat racial discrimination, however, this law still anchored in the rhetoric of modernity starts from assuming racial discrimination or racism as the starting point of the problem, thus taking for granted the natural existence of racial distinctions, as well as the intrinsic relationship between race and ethnicity, between race and “culture". The legislator, in his spirit, was not aware that before the appearance of race as a marker of distinction, race had to be invented, more so than the process of invention of race, as a process of dehumanization of the non-white, is not reduced to the individualistic treatment with which laws are formulated from the principles of legal liberalism. The process of invention of race, or racialization, consists of the historical movement of institutionalization of the Other as excluded from the Western historical whole as a zone of being. Thus, racism does not consist of individual action, it consists of a particular type of structural and structuring historical-social relationship of institutions, inasmuch as these are sociocultural objectivities of the forms of aggression assumed by the modern-colonial civilization project.
There is therefore an inseparable relationship between racism and social exclusion that the discourse of inclusion is unable to resolve. The fight against racial discrimination based on the incorporation of all racialized subjects does not solve the problem, since the externalization movement is precisely what constitutes the totality as a colonial totality. Anti-discrimination policies as inclusion policies end up not being anti-racist policies, on the contrary, their agency results in validating the inside as an insurmountable and even desirable historical reality. Inclusion as an anti-discrimination principle lacks the sensibility-sensibility to go beyond the reification of an inside that is always white, European, male, capitalist, heterosexual and Christian. The fight against racial discrimination is to confront the phenomenal manifestation, leaving intact the phenomenological reason. In other words, it is the confusion that occurs when there is no distinction between the phenomenon and its foundation. It is for this reason that we propose, with this workshop, to raise the necessary questions to understand that, in the historical need to transcend colonial modernity, we must combat racial discrimination, yes, but it is urgent to combat the institutional mechanisms of racialization.