Sherene Razack is Distinguished Professor and the Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at UCLA. She was previously Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE. Her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is also the founder of the virtual teaching and research network Racial Violence Hub. She is best known for her contributions to feminist and critical race studies about discrimination against Muslim and Indigenous women in Canada, systemic racism in the Canadian justice system, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide. She is the author of numerous books including Dying From Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody and Casting Out: Race and the Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics. After the Air India Flight 182 bombing, Razack was hired to write a report by the families of the victims. In the report, she outlined the racism apparent throughout the Canadian government’s response to the bombing.
In her lecture, Razack presented a summary of some of her arguments in her forthcoming book, Casting Out: Race and the Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics. She examined the everyday life of the War on Terror in Canada, including the image of the dangerous Muslim man, racist discourse, and the limited presumption of innocence. Three allegorical figures, the dangerous Muslim man, the imperiled Muslim woman, and the civilized European animated a story about a family of white nations, a civilization obliged to use force to defend itself against a menacing cultural Other. This story supplied the governing logic of several laws and legal processes in North America and Europe, underwriting the stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, abandonment, torture, and bombing of Muslim populations. Her two central arguments about the war on terror were: (1) race-thinking, the denial of a common human bond, remained the defining feature of the contemporary world order; and (2) this colour-lined world was increasingly governed by the logic of the exception and the camps of abandoned or rightless people it created. The expulsion of certain people from the national community was a strategy to fortify the nation-state, making possible the creation of white subjects as a superior people. Ultimately, no one stood outside of this empire: feminist activists casting Muslim women as inherently oppressed were as complicit as soldiers. Razack urged the audience to come to know themselves as responsible, to confront the idea of a clash of civilization, of occupation, to contest this imperial project.