ABSTRACT

Derrick Bell's parable about the "permanence of racism"—the subtitle of the collection in which the story was published—raises important and disturbing issues regarding the material, ideological, and psychic structures of racism and specifically about the nation's willingness to pursue a strategy "in which the sacrifice of the most basic rights of blacks would result in the accrual of substantial benefits to all whites." By expanding Bell's ideas to include Latino, Native American, and Asian American populations in the scenario, as well as the class and gender axes that cut across the racial order, we can discover significant contemporary examples that increasingly involve the removal of substantial numbers of people from civil society. In tact, the prison industrial complex has given us a new scenario of removal and disappearance, which marks men and women, mostly of color, as the primary raw material for a profitable punishment industry.