Race & Class

In the first year of his second term in 2025, President Trump systematically reshaped the United States’ immigration system through a series of executive orders (EOs) and proclamations. This article argues that these EOs and their subsequent policies should not be simply understood as exceptional authoritarian tools in extraordinary political times in the United States. Instead, these seemingly disparate measures reflect historical continuity when examined within the broader context of the country’s violent and exclusionary racial politics and anti-immigrant past. As such, the article argues that President Trump’s EOs, proclamations and their corresponding policies are serving as routine technologies of racial statecraft – embedding Great Replacement (GRT) ideology within the administrative machinery of the US such that it is no longer a cultural conspiracy or fringe ideology. Through legitimising state practice and explaining policy coherence across apparently disparate executive actions, these measures are serving as administrative rationality. Using a genealogical reading of policies derived from the current EOs on immigration, the article concludes with the implications for the future of multiracial citizenship and belonging in the United States.

Genocide is commonly approached as an exceptional crime defined by episodes of mass killing, yet such understandings remain inadequate for grasping how colonial modernity organises the systematic destruction of collective existence. Dominant approaches to genocide have historically been shaped by Eurocentric legalism and Holocaust-centred paradigms, which have constrained analysis to questions of intent and eventfulness. As a result, they have struggled to apprehend forms of violence that unfold through racialised governance, infrastructure, and the gradual erosion of the conditions that sustain collective life over time, particularly in settler-colonial contexts. The article advances the concept of ‘infrastructures of existence’ to capture the material, social, symbolic and political systems through which racialised populations reproduce themselves across generations. From this perspective, genocide is understood as a cumulative process that operates through coordinated assaults on these infrastructures rather than solely through direct killing. Four interrelated vectors are identified: ontological denial, through which racialised groups are positioned outside the moral boundaries of humanity; reproductive destruction, which undermines intergenerational continuity; epistemic erasure, which targets knowledge systems and testimonial authority; and necropolitical domination, which governs racialised populations through managed unlivability. The argument is developed through an analysis of Gaza, approached as a paradigmatic site of contemporary colonial violence. The genocide since October 2023 is situated within a longue durée of settler-colonial harm that Palestinians describe as an ongoing Nakba, which aims at the systematic dismantling of collective existence.

This article reconsiders C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones as theorists of totality whose work exposed foundational limits within mid-twentieth-century Marxism, liberal anti-colonialism and metropolitan feminism. Rather than treating race, class and gender as analytically separable or politically sequential problems, James and Jones insisted that capitalism, empire and heteropatriarchy form an integrated system whose contradictions can only be confronted through unified analysis and struggle. Reading them in dialectical relation, the article develops what we term the totality problem, that is, the persistent difficulty of accommodating such integrated critique within dominant traditions of political thought. Situating their work initially within the Caribbean experience and tracing its subsequent movement, marginalisation and partial incorporation during the second half of the twentieth century, the piece argues that James and Jones offer a method for analysing domination and imagining decolonial humanism beyond the limits of liberal universalism.