Falguni A. Sheth: Until 2001, I thought of my identity in terms of ethnicity rather than race. I was an immigrant, and in the American imaginary, immigrants were rarely discussed in terms of race. After September 11, 2001, I tried to reconcile what I saw as the profound racist treatment of people (often Arabs and South Asians) who were perceived as Muslim, with a politically neutral understanding of “racial identity,” but it didn’t work. That’s when I began to explore race as a critical category of political philosophy, and as a product of political institutions. The biggest surprise was my coming to understand that “liberalism” and systematic racism were not antithetical, but inherently compatible, and that systemic racism was even necessary to liberalism. Soon after, I read Charles Mills’s “The Racial Contract,” which supported that view. […] Aside from the cultural hostilities that are foisted upon brown people, my non-ambiguous brownness sensitizes me to the vulnerabilities — the lack of rights, security, safety, legal protection — of being nonwhite in a polity that understands “good” and “deserving” members as being white and upper- or at least middle-class men and women. I remember my mother being treated roughly by police when she was in a traffic accident and again, their indifference when she was targeted by the “Dotbusters,” a self-appointed gang of racial nationalists that was assaulting Asian Indians in northern New Jersey in the late 1980s. […] Through such experiences, I have come to understand identity not as racial, but racialized, through populations’ relations, and vulnerability, to the state, which also is the basis of my book. The political framework of liberalism, which promises equality and universal protection for “all,” depends on people to believe those promises, so that racial discrimination, brutality, violence, dehumanization, can be written off as accidental, incidental, a problem with the application of liberal theory rather than part of the deep structure of liberalism. My book attempts to show that racism, racial exclusion, racial violence, is part and parcel of liberalism. […] Political vulnerability is intrinsic to any society, but the rhetoric of universal and equal protection conceals the systematic impulse to exclude certain populations at any given time. The groups who are vulnerable are subject to change, depending upon how threatening they are, and/or how useful it would be to those in power to discard them, In the early 1990s, the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts drew attention to how the bodies of American black women were policed. For example, if they were using drugs while pregnant, they were subject to being charged with crimes and thrown in prison. Vulnerability goes beyond bio-power. Other examples include the internment of Americans, Peruvians and other Latin Americans of Japanese origin during the Second World War, or the deportation of Chinese migrants from the United States in the 1880s, and the disfranchisement of Asians from their United States-purchased land in the early 1900s. And needless to say, the wide-scale disfranchising of Muslims in the post-9/11 United States is but another recent example. In each of these cases, they are deprived of protections because they are perceived as threats in some way, and so they become — explicitly or not so explicitly — subject to laws intended to constrain, dehumanize, criminalize them. It is a gradual process, but they are increasingly vilified, demonized, dehumanized, which then rationalizes the move to strip them of protections under the mantle of “legality.” That is what my work explores. More here.