ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to track the ways in which racism, imperialism, and colonialism–in their inextricable interconnectedness and interactivity–structure such foundational categories as life, death, and the Human. The belief in racism as individual attitude also problematically erases the reality that racism operates systemically and at every level of life. The example of sexual racism demonstrates that an analysis of racism as Gilmore defines it must be pursued through the critical lens of “intersectionality.” Many scholars and activists prefer the term “white supremacy” to the term “racism,” believing that “white supremacy” more accurately captures the specific culpabilities and outcomes of racial oppression. The histories of Asian American immigration and subjugation provide a useful context for understanding the interrelated operations of orientalism and empire. A truly anti-racist practice and performance of art and life must be similarly unapologetic and uncompromising in its coalitional opposition to racial capitalism and antiblackness, to settler colonialism, orientalism, and empire.
