Towards an affective understanding of processes of racialization

Introduction

In 2014, James M Thomas published a ground-breaking article in this journal, entitled “Affect and the sociology of race: A program for critical inquiry”. There, four hegemonic racial studies programs—Racial Formation Theory; Systemic Racism; Color-Blind Racism; and Critical Race Theory—were analyzed and two key problems were found: “a reductivist account of the role of culture in the production of race and racism and the essentializing of the political identity of racial Others” (Thomas, 2014: 72). To overcome those shortcomings, Thomas proposed a different paradigm for the study of race—an affective program. We are following in his steps and are proposing a way to understand processes of racialization using some of the developments advanced by the affective turn (above all the idea of “assemblages”), analyzing how co-informing identifications work in assemblages in terms of the identitarian articulations they enter into. ¹

To do so, we will take advantage of an example we use in race and ethnicity courses to illustrate how processes of racialization work in the United States. Before the advent of Uber, Lyft, and the like, when taxis were a primary method of transportation in congested cities, this example showed that, in the United States, money does not whiten. The example in question portrays an affluent Black CEO, repeatedly (and anxiously) looking at his wristwatch because he cannot, after an hour of attempts in front of the headquarters of his company, hail a taxi; while his secretary, who happens to be white, found success with the first cab she saw.

Though the four hegemonic racial studies programs mentioned by Thomas give us interesting entrances into how racism works in the United States, in none of them do affects and emotions play a central role. The recent work of Emirbayer and Desmond (2015), along with articles by Saldanha (2006, 2007), Swanton (2010), M’Charek (2013), and Bonilla-Silva (2019), try to remedy this problem, but there is more to be done. The aim of this article is to advance in that direction using the insights provided by the affective turn in their various incarnations, above all the ideas of assemblages, affective practices, and the performative character of emotions, much of which derives from the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. We combine those developments with the idea of identitarian articulations (Vila, 2015; Vila and Avery-Natale, 2018). In that regard, we maintain, as many people using the term assemblage do, that objects, people, discourses, emotions, affects, and so on enter into assemblages, bringing with them various capacities and potentialities to be enacted in the assemblage. When enacted, it is likely that the capacities of a component of the assemblage will shift via its relationship, and that this will bring new future possibilities into potential being.

Processes of racialization that work within instantiations of particular assemblages

Anecdotally, there is ample evidence that black people in America face daily indignities and hardships rooted in stereotypes, racial profiling, and other elements of racism. Further, it is clear that wealth and other forms of status do not “whiten”, which is to say that, while certain economic and social privileges beyond race may make life easier, these advantages do not prevent a person from experiencing racism, prejudice, bigoty, micro-aggressions, and so on.

A famous example of these public indignities is the struggle that many black Americans of all classes (even very affluent ones) experience when attempting to hail a taxi in American cities. Examples of this include the former Mayor of New York City, David N Dinkins, who has reported the common experience of being bypassed by taxi drivers who, shortly down the road, choose to pick up a white passenger. Mayor Dinkins described “a cabdriver’s refusing to stop for him, but picking up a white person just down the block” (Hevesi, 1994: 51). Other well-known upper-middle-class individuals have expressed similar concerns. Danny Glover, for example, has reported that five taxis refused to stop for him in a single day (Harris and Ahuja, 2009: np). Before entering the White House, Michelle Obama has claimed that she and Barrack Obama had trouble catching cabs in Chicago (Nicks, 2014: np).

Philosopher and Princeton professor Cornel West fumed for an hour at a street corner as cab after cab passed him up … Manning Marable, a professor of history at Columbia University recounted how he nearly died of high fever while trying to go by cab to a hospital only to have taxi after taxi pass him by. (Hodges, 2007: 170)

The examples of mayors, professors of elite universities, and an actor get attention and emphasize the point that class does not whiten, though black Americans lacking in fame and living in impoverished neighborhoods likely have even worse troubles. Further, even to the degree that class may alleviate some hardships (the wealthy African-Americans we cited above could, for example, afford to hire a limousine if they so wished), certain elements of class (especially for those who are not famous) may be more fluid as an individual enters and exits certain spaces, such as the public arenas of a city and its transportation options. To this end, Feagin has written:

In most workplaces, middle-class status and its organizational resources provide some protection against certain categories of discrimination. This protection probably weakens as a black person moves from those work and school settings where he or she is well-known into public accommodations such as large stores and city restaurants where contacts are mainly with white strangers. On public streets blacks have the greatest public exposure to strangers and the least protection against overt discriminatory behavior, including violence. (Feagin, 1991: 102)

There is no shortage of examples of this phenomenon and listing the many examples is not itself important. ² Our point is that race is not “a thing” that exists independent of the scenarios of racialization and racism in which race is enacted. Instead, race manifests uniquely (though always in relation to ideas of race and racism that already were present in minds, bodies, discourses, and so on) and, while class does not whiten, class does have effects on race much like race affects class, producing distinct outcomes in the geo-socio-political spaces in which it is actualized.

Following the lead of Swanton (2010: 2339), we are “concerned … with race as something that bodies do in interaction through the relations they form with other bodies, things, and spaces, rather than race as something that bodies possess, or something written onto the body”. Additionally, we are attentive to “ … the very different intensities and modalities through which race surfaces in interaction” (Swanton, 2010: 2343). The scene described earlier can be analyzed as an instance of the workings of an “assemblage”, understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the French word agencement, a term indicating design, layout, organization, arrangement, and relations. In this regard, an assemblage is a composition that works with a pre-existing set of entities and gives it a different order (Buchanan, 2017: 458). Thus, “an assemblage is both the provisional holding together of a group of entities across differences and a continuous process of movement and transformation as relations and terms change” (Anderson et al., 2012: 177). With such a different order, “race”, appears in the assemblage with different intensities to affect and be affected. Any instantiation of an assemblage, in our case a “public transportation” assemblage, is both the outcome of a continuous flow of affects and a simultaneous producer of affects. This assemblage is held together, primarily, by the flow of desire.

Affective states such as anxiety (the CEO’s and the cab driver’s), greed or an alternative version of fear if the driver is afraid of not being able to pay his bills or feed his family (that is, the taxi driver’s greed or fear, if he is afraid of losing tips), frustration, doubt, and more comingle with the affective conductors of the space—the cars, lights, the bodies of others on the street, the texture and quality of the CEO’s suit that somehow, for all its cost, does not distract from the CEO’s racialized body, marked on his skin—articulated with some sort of signification process—resulting in a lower capacity to act by successfully hailing a cab. Everything is kept together by desire: the desire of the city planners to move people efficiently, the CEO to go home, and the taxi driver to earn a living. ³

Our main argument is that the CEO’s race materializes as a unique version of blackness, meaning that it affects and is affected in particular ways, and with particular intensities and capacities, as a result of the instantiation of the assemblage; it is emerging in relation to and from the synergy of a host of bodies and things (Saldanha, 2006). Though he may frequently (though not always) be materialized as a “black man”, what kind of black man this CEO is in this particular encounter, and to what intensity, will vary based upon the other components of the assemblage. As Buchanan points out (2015: 390): the instantiation of the assemblage that eventually materializes different types of bodies, “is the productive intersection of a form of content (actions, bodies, and things) and a form of expression (affects, words and ideas)”. Buchanan also points out (2017: 472–473) “that what is of central importance – and the reason why the assemblage is such a powerful concept – is the issue of what it takes to yoke together these two dimensions in the first place: this is what the assemblage does”.

Additionally, even as a raced person, the CEO’s ability to act, his ability to affect and be affected, is conditioned by the way in which his race has been materialized in any moment. As we will show later, race is not predefined in every given encounter and does not have the same capabilities of affecting and being affected in every instance. Instead, we argue that what race can “do” is variable depending upon the nature of the assemblage at hand and the multiplicity of other bodies (human and nonhuman) and technologies that enter into an arrangement with the CEO’s skin color. Thus, race always comes with particular powers, abilities to act, and limitations that prescribe what race can “do” in that particular assemblage because of the various affects that comingle and the varied intensities that flow within the encounter. This approach allows us to, on the one hand, incorporate previous theoretical paradigms of race that already tell us why the CEO cannot get a taxi (see Thomas, 2014) while, on the other hand, moving beyond them to include more. For example, if we were advocates of racial formation theory (Omi and Winant, 2014), we would describe the taxi episode in terms of the historical process occurring as a consequence of different “racial projects” that redistribute resources along racial lines and in which the taxi driver would likely be attuned to a racial “common sense” in which African-American males are seen as dangerous or as “bad tippers” (or, more likely, both). However, this approach focuses on the “rational” and economic development of racial group interests, which ignores the often nonrational (which is not necessarily to say “irrational”) emotions that play a role in driving these projects. Alternatively, if our preferred theoretical stance were systemic racism (Feagin, 2006), we would describe the taxi episode in terms of the racism that is embedded in American institutions and the entire social fabric of the nation and its institutions. Our approach includes this embeddedness as a part of the assemblage, but also does more by recognizing that even this system actualizes idiosyncratically in particular scenarios; that systemic racism is not just a “thing” that is “out there” as a cause, but is a potentiality to be actualized in time and space.

Without eliminating the importance of these other approaches, which we believe are each potentially incorporated in the Deleuzian approach, we show the importance of these “doings”, “intensities”, and affective capacities that are emphasized in the following quote from Deleuze and Guattari:

To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from external parts or from the individual’s own parts … (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 256–257)

Of course, elements of the encounter preceded it (African ancestry, maleness, taxi, street light, taxi driver, etc.), but only some of their capacities to affect and be affected are realized in the encounter, becoming at that moment peculiar versions of themselves. Some of those affects actualizing prior elements in particular ways are linked to the elements’ capacities that are non-representational, such as, for example, the level of lighting in the street, which is essential for the taxi driver to identify what kind of potential passenger is hailing him. In this regard, the light affects the racialization of the CEO in different ways, ranging from good light/easy identification/racialization/decision of not picking up the passenger; to the opposite, i.e. very bad light/misrecognition/nonracialization/decision not to speed up and abandon the scene when the driver discovers that the passenger is black/picking the passenger up, regardless of the fear the action entails. Does it transform the “race” or the “perception of the race” of the Black CEO? The answer to this question is neither one and both of them, because what is altered by how the light affects the encounter is what version of race (if any) is finally actualized in the instance. ⁶

Additionally, emotions and their intensities are always already elements of the assemblage that is being instantiated in the encounter, i.e. the assemblage has particular outcomes because of the performative character of emotions (Ahmed, 2014). ⁷ In our example, without fear as an emotion affecting the other bodies in the scene, the assemblage may not have materialized the combination of black skin and male as “menacing” to the taxi driver, resulting in a different outcome. On the other hand, once a particular assemblage starts working (i.e. produces some kind of effects) it evokes particular emotions, or different intensities of the same emotion. People do not arrive at encounters as blank slates, without some loosely defined (sketches of) identifications and habitual dispositions, and they do not arrive “emotionless” either: identities and habitual dispositions are full of emotions. In other words, racializations are produced by the circulation of affects that occur within a particular assemblage. Some of those affects can be linked to the performative character of discourses (where interpellations occupy center stage – “a Black guy, no way I will pick him up!”). Other affects, though, can be attributed to the agential power (their capacity to affect and be affected) of entities such as objects and technologies, or affective atmospheres.

In this approach, race is not something a person “has” or “is”. Instead, we describe racialization as the product of a set of relationships; race is the outcome of an assemblage that does not necessarily materialize in a person’s body, but in the relations established between different bodies (M’Charek, 2013: 434; see also Swanton, 2010: 2338), where “bodies” can be a human body, an object, or a body of discourses. Race, then, is what Deleuze and Guattari call “content” (i.e. the machinic assemblage of bodies – people, things, actions) and also “expression” (i.e. collective assemblage of enunciations – words, ideas). Therefore, even something so clearly material such as skin color, by itself, cannot be inherently racialized and, in our example, would not by itself determine if the African-American CEO will be picked up or not.

Our approach is in line with M’Charek (2013: 424) when she points out that, “To say that different relational configurations make different versions of race is radically different from saying that race might assume different meanings in different contexts”. What we are stressing here is not how race acquires meaning differently in different situations, but how race materializes differently and has the capacity of producing different effects while surfacing with distinct intensities from different assemblages. Race materialized in the encounter described not only because of the driver’s “perception”, but also because of his “feelings”, i.e. elicited intensities which, in many cases, “guide” perceptions. And the emergence of particular emotions cannot be separated from how the other elements of the assemblage are arranged.

In our example, fear circulates to produce particular outcomes. Of course, other emotions may also be present (emotions never circulate in isolation from each other, but always work in “packages”, in some kind of articulation) and so may be plain individual racism. However, even then, “racism” has an emotional component, which can go with the name of “hate”, “disgust”, “contempt”, and the like. But for the purposes of this article, we concentrate on those taxi drivers that did not pick up our African-American CEO out of “fear”. ⁸ In choosing fear as the driving emotion of our article, we are not claiming that there could not be other scenarios in which different emotions take on a dominant role. Further, we are not arguing that there might not be geo-political spaces in which fear is less important. Instead, we are choosing fear and its operation in the United States as one of many emotions that can contribute to a racialization and that will be, in this article, the primary emotion under study. In short, fear can be one of the affects flowing through the scene, triggered by the particular way the elements of the assemblage become arranged, and once triggered, conditioning how objects and subjects relate to each other in the assemblage from that point on. Additionally, the appearance of fear in the encounter triggers particular capacities of the CEO, the taxi, and the taxi driver (among myriad other objects, significations, and technologies), producing the outcome of a CEO waiting for more than an hour to get a cab. If fear was replaced by some other emotion (such as “trust” as we will show below), the capacities brought about by the CEO, the taxi, and the taxi driver would have been totally different, and the outcome (likely) different as well.

Having accounted for our theoretical sources let us go back to the original encounter, but make changes to that instantiation that will alter not only what affects flow through the encounter, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the intensity with which affects and emotions eventually flow in the assemblage. Therefore, any changes to the encounter, no matter how major or minor, such as the entering and exiting of new identities, will also modify the flow of affects and thus modify the eventual turn of events.

We start by introducing age as an identification that enters into an articulation with the four other identifications we have so far introduced into our analysis, i.e. passenger/taxi driver, race, gender and class. If our CEO is of old age in the content of the assemblage, things change. If the CEO of our example happened to be in his late eighties, his probability of being picked up by the taxi driver increases, and his bodily capacities augment, at least in terms of the time he needs to go home. At least in the United States, fear is usually linked to young African-Americans, not the elderly (see Hodges, 2007: 175 for how this work in terms of New York taxi drivers’ relations with young African-Americans hailing them). In terms of Ahmed’s theory, fear “sticks” more easily to the first age group than to the second. In this sense, when age enters the identitarian choreography (see Vila, 2015) of the assemblage to articulate with the other identifications already present (passenger, race, and gender), as well as the material objects and technology present in the scene, it enters through its potential capacities, where “harm”, as a capacity, is usually linked more to young bodies than to very old bodies. This reduction in fear increases the likelihood that the octogenarian African-American CEO will be picked up by the taxi driver.

What of gender? If, as discussed above, fear is usually linked to African-American men, the introduction of a different gender identification would alter the intensity of fear in the encounter, in all probability lessening it and augmenting the female African-American CEO’s capabilities of getting a cab. We can extend the explanation ad infinitum, introducing one by one different identifications of the CEO, such as disability or religion, entering the scene. If we do so, we will be able to show how most of them, when articulated to the identifications of “potential passenger”, race and class, will alter how fear circulates in the assemblage.

The identifications that we have mentioned one by one entering the choreography of the identitarian articulation of our African-American CEO more often than not, will enter the encounter in some sort of complex combination themselves, altering the circulation of fear accordingly. In that way, for instance, an 89-year-old African-American female CEO in a wheelchair while hailing a cab will have the lowest flow of fear, independent of why she is or is not picked up—the cabbie may be ableist and thus refuse to pick her up for other reasons, producing a unique outcome. All the other possible identitarian articulations (young Black male in a wheelchair, young Black female, Black male with a child, pregnant Black female CEO, Black drag queen still dressed from a performance, and so on and so forth) we can think of will mobilize different intensities of fear (and other emotions) and the outcome of the event (being or not being picked up) will be modified accordingly. We will not pursue this line of analysis because the reader can garner a clear idea of what we are getting at. Instead we want to offer another angle of analysis to the issue of race working within assemblages and how emotions circulate in them.

Importantly, objects and technologies are also agents in an encounter, having similar capacities to affect and be affected, i.e. similar agentic capacities to human beings and, as such, are highly involved in how emotions flow in assemblages. In this regard, the “other” is not simply another human being; an “other” can be an “entity”, like attire, a building, a taxi, and the like. As M’Charek (2013: 424) points out, the idea is to “decenter” the human actor and attend to the agency of nonhumans as well. Thus, action cannot be attributed only to humans because human actors are addressed by other entities as well. In this way, someone’s “race”, for instance, is not solely conditioned by how that person is linguistically addressed by the different names available in the racial system of names and how such an address triggers a system of actions but also by how other nonhuman entities (objects, technologies) play an agentic role in the scene of action.

Considering the different objects and technologies present in the setting, let us start with the example of attire, which is obviously related to race, class, and gender, but not in a one-to-one relationship. If the African-American CEO was the young executive producer of a hip hop record label (dressed with all the stereotypical clothing that, in popular culture, would be tied to the representational economy of the appearance of Black male youth), more probably than not, fear, as an emotion, will increase the intensity of its flow within the assemblage, due to the widespread stereotypical image of young black delinquents currently common in the United States. With such an increase in the intensity of fear, the probability of being picked up by a taxi driver will probably decrease, and the bodily capacities of the young African-American CEO will be diminished: he will need much more time to go back home, either walking or calling some acquaintance to pick him up. But what if our young African-American CEO was dressed for a special occasion wearing his Giorgio Armani suit and watching his limited-edition Rolex while waiting for a taxi? Here, as described above, it is not that “class trumps race” and he is rapidly picked up by a cab driver. The issue is much more complicated than that.

Our position is that the identification “class”, linked to a set of capacities to affect and be affected, enters the encounter articulated with the affective capacity of attire to lessen the intensity of fear that usually accompanies instances in which young African-Americans want to get a taxi at night in densely populated cities. In other words, it is not class itself that lessens the intensity of fear, but class is “read” and felt from the materiality of a particular piece of cloth, from the capacity of that piece of cloth to symbolize class, and from the common-sense assumption that rich people do not rob taxi drivers. Obviously, reading that piece of cloth requires some sort of “cloth literacy” without which an Armani suit can be any type of suit.

Conversely, if all the other elements of the assemblage lean toward a very charged fearful experience, no Armani suit, even if well read, would be able to alter the intensity of fear; class by itself (enacted by the presence of the Armani suit), without the intervention of the other elements of the encounter (the lighting of the scene, the presence or absence of other people, etc.), does not have the capability to modify the outcome. Here, we must continue to emphasize the importance of representations, the collective assemblage of enunciations, and hegemony. It is not the case that we are arguing that African-Americans should simply choose to dress differently to avoid negative outcomes, up to and including death. “Blaming the victim” is a common theme in American racism, such that, for example, Treyvon Martin was more readily blamed for wearing a hoodie and thus producing the feeling of “fear” in George Zimmerman than was Zimmerman blamed for murdering Martin. Instead, we argue that the “black male in a hoodie” is in no way intrinsically “threatening” (as conservative news broadcasters claimed). Instead, the experience of “fear” and “threat” only emerges when a particular racist set of representations about black people meet a particular attire (a hoodie; hip hop styles) and a certain skin hue in a particular place and time. Importantly, this place and time is not only “the suburbs at night”, which would again run the risk of blaming the victim by implying that someone like Marin did not “belong” there. Instead, we have to take the entirety of American white supremacy as it operates at this point in time into consideration to recognize that the choice of clothing is only one small part of the assemblage and, as such, not worthy of blame. This becomes abundantly clear when we consider that hip hop is one of the world’s most popular styles of music, widely appreciated and appropriated by consumers of all races in many nations. It is therefore unlikely that the attire stereotypically associated with rap music would produce fear unto itself. On the contrary, if that same attire were placed on a young, light-skinned body, situated in a suburban area, during the daytime, near a high school, little to no fear would likely be experienced. In other words, central to our understanding is the manifestation of the particular racialization coupled with fear in a particular geo-socio-political space that allows for the racist process to actualize and not by the fault of its victim. Further, this emphasizes the importance of the perspective of the taxi driver whose gaze and whose fear or racism is also central to the actualization in question. In other words, it is not enough that the clothed body be present, as the potentially racist visualizations of the driver are a central element of the scene. Further still, attire is hardly all that matters here. Technology is another possible agent in the setting that exercises its capacities to affect and be affected. We can imagine varying amounts of lighting in a scene would affect all the other elements of the assemblage, altering the intensity of fear flowing within the assemblage and influencing its possible outcome.

Identitarian articulations

We want to now concentrate our analysis on a very important point that was briefly mentioned earlier: that affects in general and emotions in particular are instrumental in the way a particular identitarian articulation and not another possible one ends up being materialized, enacted, and performed in a particular encounter through the exercising of their different capacities. If in the Black CEO event, race is articulated with gender, age, disability and the other identifications we mentioned before, it is because particular affects and emotions (or different intensities of the same affects and emotions) are materializing that particular identitarian articulation and not another. In other words, depending on the affects and emotions circulating in the encounter, particular identitarian articulations, not only a particular “race”, will emerge and not others. For example, extreme fear of Black males as an emotion can have the effect of not being able to articulate “age”, “class”, and “disability” to the identitarian articulation of a black body. Similarly, even those identities when articulated will be influenced by the others. Age, for example, has been shown to shift with race such that police officers often perceive of black boys as young as 10 as being older, guiltier, and more likely of enacting violence than are white boys of the same age. This enacts a higher probability of those officers using potentially deadly force (Goff et al., 2014).

In instances of extreme fear or racism, such relationships between identities, objects, technologies, and so on may articulate so that even a very old Black CEO who is rich and well-dressed is “raced” as a potentially menacing African-American, in much the same way that in cases of extreme fear and racism even a young black male doing something as innocent as eating Skittles may be perceived of as violent and threatening. In other words, particular identifications that could eventually break the assemblage ‘menacing black’ if the level of fear was less extreme, are not “invited” to the identitarian choreography to do so because of the intensity of the racism brought to the scene.

In this regard, we join a growing group of people who, still recognizing the productivity of the concept, want to add complexity to the idea of “intersectionality”. As Elisabeth Grosz points out:

Bodies are always irreducibly sexually specific, necessarily inter-locked with racial, cultural, and class particularities. This interlocking, though, cannot occur by way of intersection (the gridlike model presumed by structural analysis, in which the axes of class, race, and sex are conceived as autonomous structures which then require external connections with the other structures) but by way of mutual constitution. (Grosz, 1994: 19–20; emphasis ours)

Thus, the different identifications people deploy in an encounter through the enactment of some of their capacities (such as class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and the like) overlap with other identifications in different situations. This overlapping, though, does not imply that these identifications simply come together, forming some new whole. Instead, the conscious cognitive elements of the identifications that exist prior to their performance in any given encounter, the non-conscious dispositions or habits linked to those identifications (both of them emotionally imbued), along with the physical, symbolic, spatial, technological, etc. aspects of the scenario, co-inform and co-develop one another, contingently and temporarily, immanently, at the moment of action, through the enactment of some of their different capacities.

Which identitarian articulations’ capacities will finally be sequentially performed will be defined by the particular characteristics of the encounter at stake, including, very importantly, relations of power in the scenario. Out of those capacities (alongside the agentic capacity of things and technologies in the scene) we showed how the outcome of that particular instantiation of the public transportation assemblage is either the CEO happily going home in a taxi, or having to find an alternative way home, enraged and frustrated (see also Vila, 2015; Vila and Avery-Natale, 2018).

New technologies and their impact in how assemblages work

Today, fewer people use traditional taxis. Instead, ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft have largely replaced the old yellow taxi-cab. In this case, technologies enter the assemblage as a nonhuman actor modifying the encounter and producing a distinct outcome. These apps bring a new affect (qualified as an emotion) into the scene that was lacking from the taxi example: trust. As trust enters into the assemblage via the technology, fear diminishes. The rider, who the driver cannot see in advance, has already paid. Further, the driver can identify that the rider has a high (or low) ranking in the app. Further, the rider’s trust also increases because the app effectively “forces” the driver to pick up the passenger they are paired with regardless of the personal characteristics of the passenger. In other words, the technology of Uber adds an additional level of accountability, showing that the app has the agentic capacity to alter the outcome, to affect the scene. This gives the African-American CEO more of an ability to act in the public transportation assemblage, he has capacities that were previously denied him producing an easier ride home.

As we can see, technology, as a non-human actor in the assemblage, has a very important agentic capacity to dramatically modify how the assemblage works. Specifically, by modifying how a particular intensity of fear that materializes the African-American CEO, the Uber driver, the car and the like to such a degree that even the most fearful of the identitarian articulations that surely denied the African-American CEO his will to go home in a taxi does not deny him his ride home with Uber. In this example, Uber’s technology modifies the effect that the identification “race” can have upon the assemblage in terms of its capacity to affect and be affected. The relationships the elements of the assemblage enter into, via the exercising of some of their capacities, trigger different affects and emotions operating at different intensities that situationally and provisionally materialize particular identitarian articulations, objects, and technologies in the assemblage resulting in different outcomes and a different kind of racialization along with different powers to act for our CEO.

In lieu of conclusions

Through the article we have argued that it is not enough to “add” affect and emotions to the mix to fully understand racialized relations. We propose to go beyond that and include the very stimulating proposals coming from some of the advocates of the affective turn. Our goal has been to show that race is something that is “done”, not something that simply “is”. Further, we claim that race enters into a complex articulation with the other identifications that enter into the assemblage, even if only as partial sketches, and the physical, technological, and representational elements of the scene. There is, then, an enactment of some of the capacities that these varied elements virtually contain prior to assembling. Race, then, never materializes “alone” but always in relation. As a result, we can understand that assemblages can produce difference outcomes through the intervention of other identifications in the identitarian articulation and other material, technological and representational elements working in the assemblage.

This shows that race itself, as a situational and provisional congealment of a process of racialization, materializes (if at all) in idiosyncratic ways in assemblages through the circulation of affect and emotions (and more) in said assemblage. If race appears at all, it will operate distinctly, it will in meaningful ways be different and capable of different things, based upon the overall assemblage in question. In our case, fear’s circulation results in the immanent emergence of varied combinations of identifications, materializing different kinds of racialized bodies. In articulation, these bodies exercise different capacities and produce distinct effects; ultimately, the identitarian articulations, objects, and technologies materialize as different (types of) things. The affects and emotions circulating in the assemblage alter the elements of the assemblage, materializing certain identitarian articulations, objects and technologies in particular ways. In other words, bodily feelings give meaning and sense to situations.

Furthermore, we wanted to show what happens if some level of trust is introduced into the assemblage. We tried first to show that, by modifying the possible identifications that enter the identitarian choreography in the encounter and some of the objects and technologies acting there, whether they be simple lighting or ridesharing technologies, the intensity of fear decreases and trust increases. With this increase in trust, it is more likely that any kind of African-American CEO (even the more “frightening”) will be picked up and brought home by any Uber driver (even the more racist one).

The introduction of Uber in our assemblage also introduces another very important aspect of how assemblages work: it is not only the entities that are “already there” that influence the outcome of the assemblage, but also those that are lurking as potentialities and have the capacities of changing some aspects of the assemblage. In that regard, Uber was a virtual possibility well before it actualized and, as such, was influencing how the designers of the public transportation system were laying out the future of the system, the taxi and future Uber drivers were deciding about their future car purchases and work schedules, etc. In the same way that the potentiality of autonomous cars, as the virtual possibility to get rid completely of both human-driven taxis and Ubers, is already influencing the current actions of city planners and taxi and Uber drivers (if we were taxi or Uber drivers we would be looking for some other job alternatives … ).

Therefore, our claim is not that race is “invented” from scratch from event to event, from assemblage to assemblage, but that race will materialize in many events (but not in all of them) in different ways, with different intensities, in particular identitarian articulations, and in relation to how particular affects and emotions circulate in those events. Out of that circulation of affects and emotions and those materializations of race (and we are talking here of race in isolation, to explain our point, but race always works in assemblages with particular articulations of other identifications) particular outcomes will ensue and the presence of race with a particular intensity will produce “effects” such as the instance that an extremely wealthy African-American CEO cannot get a cab home and has to find an alternative way to do so. Luckily for him, there is Uber.