ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an introduction to the book. Opening with a fragment from a police report of a car on which somebody had carved the word ‘Muslim’, it engages in a discussion about the power of the judiciary. This power is here defined in Foucauldian terms—as a way of establishing certain truths about an event, a way of classifying and naming certain acts, and a way of identifying the nature of an injury produced by certain events. The example of the police description of the damage done to the car, a description in which no mention is made of the underlying meaning of the word carved on it, serves to explain the objectives of the book, namely to explore the ways in which the judiciary defines, identifies, and adjudicates the racist nature of certain crimes. The chapter also provides an overview of the book.
