Abstract
In the war on terror, the state frames terrorism as an exceptional form of violence. This research examines the role of race in that framing. Analysis of the 2017 Federal Bureau of Investigation most wanted program shows that the bureau deploys race to represent the terrorist as exceptional by (1) formally deracializing terrorists, who are far less likely than nonterrorists to even have race labels on their wanted posters, and (2) labeling antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist politics as terrorism. I argue that such representations proceed in step with the material governance of terrorism that is characterized by disappearance. The representation of the terrorist as exceptional helps render the state’s antiterror apparatus as neutral and legitimate, and it continually renews the legitimacy of the colonial, capitalist state through the newer register of terrorism.
Terrorism is a social and political construct that proliferated in U.S. political discourse in the 1970s. The state used the term for a range of actions and people related to black power, Puerto Rican independence, Palestinian resistance, communism, and other anticapitalist and anticolonial projects. The concept of terrorism has shifted materially and representationally since that time (Cole 2003; Mamdani 2004; Rhodes 2017; Schotten 2018; Stampnitzky 2013). After 9/11—unlike the 1970s, when the state and terror experts sometimes approached the terrorist as a rational actor capable of negotiation—the state and terror experts framed terrorism as irrational and exceptionally violent (Stampnitzky 2013). This post-9/11 framing suggests that rational means would be ineffective for managing a problem of exceptional, unimaginable violence and thus provides an argument for the state to then meet the problem at scale. Facing a battery of policies defined by disappearance, this type of terrorist was to be removed. George W. Bush rhetorically established the terrorist as a removed figure when he repeated after 9/11 that “you are either with us or with the terrorists.”
Today, the quintessential post-9/11 terrorist is a Muslim man, but terrorism is also a broad category that serves as “the dominant framework for understanding illegitimate political violence” (Stampnitzky 2013:4). This article shows how earlier anticolonial and anticapitalist referents of terrorism in the United States have accumulated into today’s definition of terrorism, even though post-9/11 common sense often suggests otherwise. The delegitimizing of anticolonialism and anticapitalism as exceptional and removable kinds of violence has the effect of narrowing the boundaries of legitimate dissent. Any association of such politics with “terrorism” also inoculates state violence against such dissent. In these ways among others, the war on terror services the white settler state. Antiterrorism discourse and practice have served the varied needs of capital, helping the United States gain control of natural resources and land in Iraq and Afghanistan and secure or maintain lucrative relations with countries such as Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and others that also wage wars against terror (Bapat 2019; Immerwahr 2019; Mamdani 2004; Rana 2011). The war on terror characterization of the terrorist as an exceptional, removable figure provides a warrant for this expansion of empire.
In this article, I analyze a snapshot of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) most wanted program from 2017 as a site for the state’s production and representation of the terrorist, with attention to the roles of race in this production. FBI crime posters are a useful site for understanding race and terrorism because of the bureau’s use of categories of identification such as race, nationality, and so on, as well as the FBI’s classification of specific crimes across its many crime lists, including bank robbers, most wanted terrorists, and fugitives. Because terrorism is a contested, ill-defined catch-all for illegitimate political violence, the crime lists allow for the observation of the very construction of terrorism and its boundaries, rather than beginning by drawing boundaries around what counts as terrorism. I go on to show that the FBI deploys race to represent the terrorist as removed and exceptionally violent or dangerous by (1) deracializing the archetypal post-9/11 terrorist and also by (2) framing anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist politics as terrorism. I argue that this representation of the terrorist as removed is mobilized in concert with the material governance of terrorism that relies on removal. And further, the use of race to do so, sometimes in unexpected ways such as deracialization, is also a continuation of “race” as a colonial construct tied to specific projects. This production of the terrorist renews the legitimacy of the colonial, capitalist state but through the seemingly different register of terrorism.
Following an overview of the FBI’s most wanted program and a review of literature on terrorism, race, and the state of exception, I discuss the methods of analysis and two major findings of the study: that the FBI deracializes the quintessential post-9/11 terrorist; and continues to characterize anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist politics as terrorism. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for the call to expand the boundaries of who is considered a terrorist.
Making the FBI’s Most Wanted: From Bank Robbers to Terrorists
The FBI’s “ten most wanted fugitives list” was instituted on March 14, 1950, soon after a journalist for the International News Service ran the names of some of the men the FBI sought to capture (FBI n.d.). The FBI reports that readers were excited to participate in crime fighting, which motivated FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to create and distribute the list and posters to deploy the public to assist in the FBI’s work. More than 400 people have been on the FBI’s wanted lists, and more than 100 have been captured with the help of the public (Swierczynski 2014). Posters were distributed to post offices and some newspapers, posted in select neighborhoods, and plastered on some billboards. They were eventually listed on the FBI’s Web site. Since 1950, the program has grown. In addition to its top ten, the FBI now has longer crime-specific lists. The 2017 lists and sublists are as follows:
Ten most wanted fugitives
Fugitives: crimes against children, murder, additional violent crime, cybercrime, white collar crime, counterintelligence, criminal enterprise investigations, seeking information, and human trafficking
Terrorism: most wanted terrorists, seeking information – terrorism, and domestic terrorism
Parental kidnapping
Bank robbers
Endangered child alert program
The FBI created the terrorism-specific lists after 9/11. They began with a “22 most wanted terrorists” list composed mostly of people associated with 9/11 as well as older attacks such as the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution n.d.).
A combination of limited oversight and accountability of the FBI and its own record-keeping issues limit what is known about the FBI’s process for creating most wanted posters and lists (Theoharis 2004). Multiple sources report the following process for getting a suspect on the ten most wanted list, specifically (Miles 2008; Sabljak and Greenberg 1990; Swierczynski 2014). When a spot opens up on the ten most wanted, agents submit candidates to the FBI Criminal Investigative Division, which reviews and narrows the list down for it to be approved by the assistant director of the division and the deputy director of the FBI. To be added to the list, a person must be wanted on federal charges or commit a state crime and then commit unlawful flight to avoid persecution. Considerations include the frequency and type of crime, but there are no hard and fast rules. Indeed, the official FBI criteria are rather subjective: the fugitive must be considered particularly dangerous, and the bureau must believe that nationwide publicity will likely help capture them. Thousands of cases fit these criteria every year, but relatively few make it to the list. Posters are created with the American public in mind to some degree. And so, although created by one person or group, posters must be legible to an audience by reflecting back to them something familiar to them in their context, however faint the familiarity may be through shared language or meanings.
There are patterns to the FBI’s interests in its most wanted program: its 1950s fugitives were mostly bank robbers; those of the 1960s and 1970s were black revolutionaries, antiwar activists, and other leftists; 1980s fugitives faced drug-related charges; and the 1990s brought foreign terrorists to the bureau’s fugitive lists until the creation of terrorist-specific lists in 2001 (Johnston 1997; Sabljak and Greenberg 1990; Swierczynski 2014).
Tracing Terrorism
The term terrorism was first used during the French Revolution, in which the newly forming state unleashed a “reign of terror:” a campaign of massive bloodshed as part of ushering in cherished democratic values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Similarly, through the mid-twentieth century, the most common usage of the term was for violence committed by the state or institutions. As Mahmood Mamdani, Lisa Stampnitzky, Junaid Rana, and others have shown, a shift took place in the mid-twentieth century in how terrorism was constructed and managed as a problem. Bombings, hijackings, and kidnappings earlier in the 1970s were not necessarily regarded as terrorism but rather as insurgency. By the late 1970s, however, the state viewed these same actions as terrorism. This shifted how they were managed; the insurgent was seen as a rational actor who could be approached rationally through negotiation and punished using the criminal justice system. Insurgency was assumed to stem from political goals, while it came to be a question whether terrorists had political goals at all (Stampnitzky 2013). Rather than terrorism referring to violence or a tactic that anybody or specifically the state could engage, terrorism became a kind of identity attributed to a figure called the terrorist.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, over the course of the Cold War and decolonization in Asia and Africa, the height of the twentieth-century black freedom movement, and through the Reagan presidency and the Iranian Revolution, the idea that the terrorist was an irrational actor grew. As Lisa Stampnitzky traced, methods of managing the terrorist threat over the 1970s to the 1990s, such as crisis management, criminal justice, and limited retaliatory warfare, would persist after 2001, but the post-9/11 war on terror would quickly come to be characterized by a preemptive approach that was supported by a conceptualization of the terrorist as irrational, immoral, and without goals, which suggested that rational means could not control this type of terrorist: extreme measures such as torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and assassination or extrajudicial killing were required. These tactics and practices were used sparingly and secretly in response to what the state viewed as “political violence” prior to the war on terror. For example, some were used in the 1950s to the 1970s through the FBI’s secret counterintelligence program, better known as COINTELPRO, which targeted domestic political organizations, including some organizations whose former members are currently on FBI terrorist lists. After 2001, these types of tactics are used regularly and openly, from underground to the center of governance to manage “political violence.”
Terror and Exception
Terrorism and its management are characterized by removal, disappearance, and exception. In the present study, I am interested in the representation of exception, which requires a quick discussion of existing theoretical uses of exception. The phrase “state of exception” was popularized by Giorgio Agamben as an analytical category for understanding political violence. He used the concept to refer to sites specific to the camp: concentration camps in the Shoah, refugee camps, internment camps for Japanese Americans, and also antiterrorism practices after 9/11. Agamben argued that there are true states or zones of exception in which normal juridical processes do not apply and that these states of exception produce the center, norm, or rule. From a Black studies perspective, Alexander Weheliye (2014) critiqued Agamben’s state of exception for neglecting the important differences and relations between these sites, to the point that Agamben reproduced exception as an ontological status rather than critiquing it. Of racial slavery, Weheliye wrote, “extreme brutality and directed killing frequently and peacefully coexist with other forms of coercion and noncoercion within the scope of the normal juridico-political order” (p. 13). Following Weheliye, rather than considering “exception” a useful analytical category for understanding and challenging violence, I trace how exception is produced and how race is used to do so. In other words, rather than taking exception on its face, I show how terrorism is represented as an illegitimately violent exception to the legitimate rule.
Racial Attribution, Ambiguity, Amalgamation
The construction of terrorism within such a framework of exception and removal might be what Omi and Winant (2014) called a racial project. Racial projects articulate connections between structure and representation, between the material and ideological. They are “efforts to shape the ways in which human identities and social structures are racially signified” (Omi and Winant 2014:13), and they are also efforts “to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines” (Omi and Winant 2014:125). The racial categorization practices that occur with regard to terrorism are linked to resource distribution efforts or, put differently, resource consolidation efforts. Racialization, for Omi and Winant, is part of the signification process in racial projects. They defined the concept of racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (p. 111), which emphasizes the process by which racial groups are constructed.
Often drawing heavily on Omi and Winant’s theoretical framework, the body of work on racial attribution and terrorism focuses on racial profiling, the figure of the Muslim terrorist, and the lumping together of Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian people (Bayoumi 2009; Cainkar 2009; Daulatzai 2012; Genova 2012; Mosher 2011; Naber 2008; Rana 2011; Selod 2018; Semati 2010; Silva 2016). Some of this research zeroes in on the never-quite-materialized sense of racialization of the Muslim: Junaid Rana (2016) called this “Muslim racial becoming,” because Muslims are racialized but never quite defined as a race. Kumarini Silva (2016) and Mehdi Semati (2010) used the term brown, though somewhat differently, to capture this makeshift, multiracial/ethnic amalgamation the security state creates that draws on somatic brown (e.g., skin color) and ethnic brown (e.g., Indian, Arab, Latino) to create a brown of the security state as a heuristic of identification. Questions of racial categorization and naming in this article also bring up the matter of racial ambiguity. Some have challenged the concept of ambiguity to interpret the cases in which racial categorization does not appear straightforward in the context of the war on terror and for those broadly racialized as Muslim. Leerom Medovoi (2013) argued that ambiguity is not the issue; the “racialization of Arabs in America has never been understood as a matter of the ‘color of one’s skin’ but instead as a fluctuating, geopolitically motivated judgment about Islam” (p. 44). Because of a shift from biology to culture in the conceptualization of racial difference, difference can be essentialized without attaching to phenotypic features and instead attaching to presumed, selected cultural traits such as violence, misogyny, backwardness, and sexual deviance. Race is not a reflection of natural differences but a production of difference that is then considered natural. And so what is called racial ambiguity or fluidity may be better understood as a reflection of the historical reality that race and related forms of difference have many dimensions. Religion, names, crime, and so on can be proxies for race (Husain 2019; Muhammad 2010; Pager 2003). The development of race as a concept coming into the modern era drew on premodern forms of difference along the lines of religion, geography, and civilization (Heng 2011; Mills 1997), all of which still live within “race.” As a result, other factors in racial attribution include gender, color, nationality, ethnicity, name, clothing, and more in a list that is as endless as the bounds of what is racialized in our society (Brown et al. 2013; Husain 2019; Mills 1997; Monk 2015).
An important dimension of the racialization of the terrorist/Muslim is that the concept of terrorism emerged in the context of anticolonial movements in the Cold War era, not 9/11. This suggests not only that terrorism discourse has existed for a longer time than post-9/11 common sense suggests but also that its beginnings are situated in a different register than post-9/11 common sense would suggest: the racial logic governing the figure of the terrorist is not only about the presumably senseless killing of innocent civilians per 9/11 but also popular anticolonial movements and organizations that had the support of the people. The racialization of the Muslim/terrorist, in other words, is also saturated in anticolonial politics. These meanings and contexts accumulate in the war on terror and all are rendered exceptional and removed as part this racial project, lumping together not only shades of brown but wildly different political positions and goals.
Methodological Approach
The FBI is an important site for the study of race and terrorism because of its role in producing terrorism materially and ideologically. The FBI uses informants whereby the bureau first creates and then thwarts an attempted attack, it conducts surveillance of communities and organizations it suspects have connections to terrorism, and it has extrajudicially killed individuals who it suspects have connections to terrorism (Akbar 2015; Aziz 2017; Shamas and Arastu n.d.). As a key producer and distributor of representations of terrorism in the form of wanted posters, the bureau is a valuable site for understanding the ideological wing in the war on terror in relation to its material reality. FBI wanted posters, which are publicly available on the bureau’s Web site (https://www.fbi.gov/wanted), were collected in August 2017 for this project. The data set included every poster from August 2017, for a total of 345 posters (see Table 1 for a detailed breakdown of number of posters by list). 1 Every poster is in English, and some have additional copies in other languages based on the individual’s connections, such as where they may be found. Each poster has photographs and identifying information. The ostensible purpose of the posters is for average Americans to help the FBI capture criminals. The bureau and its most wanted posters are therefore not concerned with self-identity, but instead, they are concerned with providing the public with the relevant information for identification (see Silva 2016 for a discussion of the difference in the context of the war on terror). The total possible categories of identifying information that the posters work with are the following: name, year of birth used, hair, height, build, sex, languages, citizenship, place of birth, eyes, weight, race, scars and marks, complexion, occupation, nationality, reward, and National Crime Information Center number. There are few categories that every single poster has aside from the individuals’ names, but the modal poster has most of these categories. Posters typically also include a short narrative in two sections called “remarks” and “caution,” which provide narrative detail on where the person was last seen, for example, the details of their suspected crimes or charges, or whether they are armed. Analysis involved making comparisons within and across crime lists and categories, with attention to the frequency of different combinations of categories and the specific content within each category. In the findings that follow, I use the terms terrorist and nonterrorist rather than “those the FBI classifies as (non)terrorists” for the sake of brevity.
All 345 Posters by Race/Complexion and Crime List
Note: Asterisks indicate none reported. The number of nonblack, nonwhite people is in parentheses.
Of those who have a complexion, 46 percent are “olive,” about one-third are “light,” and still fewer are “dark,” “medium,” or “tan.”
List names and classifications inside of “nonterrorism lists” and “terrorism lists” are reproduced here exactly as they appeared on the FBI’s 2017 Web site.
All six are listed as citizens of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, or Yemen.
Overview of the 2017 FBI Most Wanted Program
Of the 345 total individuals, 11 percent are female, 88 percent are male, and one percent is missing a sex category. White and “white (Hispanic)” are the largest groups under the race category across all of the most wanted program. The next largest group is what I call the missing race, whose posters lack a race category. When it comes to the missing race, the comparison between terrorist and nonterrorist lists is remarkable: 91.5 percent of nonterrorists have a race category, but a quick count of the posters on the terrorist lists reveals that only 37 percent of terrorists have a race category. 2 This missing race is the highest priority of the FBI: the monetary rewards for information leading to capture listed on nonterrorist posters tend to be in the thousands, and sometimes no reward, whereas rewards tend to be in the millions on the most wanted terrorists list. The next several sections elaborate on the differences between terrorist and nonterrorist lists and between each of the two main terrorists lists. 3 The following illustrates how the FBI deploys race to produce the terrorist as an exceptional figure.
Deracialization of the Archetypal Terrorist
In the FBI most wanted program, Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, North Africans, and Middle Eastern people do not exist as a racialized whole that is lumped together as one group. In other words, those who are broadly racialized as Muslim otherwise are not lumped together as a whole here. Instead, they are cleaved along the lines of crime: between terrorist and nonterrorist. When not terrorists, they are white. When terrorists, they are raceless. A comparison between two Kuwaiti-born men—one a terrorist, one a parental kidnapper—illustrates this deracialization of the terrorist. Hilal Hasan Ali Jaafar is a foreign-born Arab Muslim man, and he is wanted for parental kidnapping (poster in Figure 1). Jaafar does have a race category and it reads “white (Kuwaitian with darker complexion than photographed above).” 4
Hilal Hasan Ali Jaafar’s wanted poster.
In contrast, Muhammad Ahmed Al-Munawar is on the most wanted terrorists list (poster in Figure 2). Like the majority of the population on that list, he is a foreign-born Arab Muslim man. Instead of race, Al-Munawar’s poster has a complexion category that reads “light.”
Muhammad Ahmed Al-Munawar’s wanted poster.
Because both men were born in Kuwait, are Arab, and have names that mark them as Muslim, one might expect that they are similarly racially categorized. Indeed, Kuwaitis and other people from the “Middle East” are officially classified as white in 2017, 5 however tenuous and nominal their whiteness (Gualtieri 2009; Maghbouleh 2017). On the basis of these considerations, one might expect both Jaafar and Al-Munawar to be classified as white or neither. Instead, the parental kidnapper is raced as white, while the terrorist is raceless. The difference in their racial categorization is even more striking in this specific comparison because Jaafar wears a turban, which one might expect would racialize someone as nonwhite or as a terrorist quite conclusively in comparison with someone like Al-Munawar, who is not wearing a turban (Brown et al. 2013). Furthermore, it is the raceless terrorist who is called “light,” while the white fugitive is called “dark.” In this comparison, skin color and physical markers do less of the work in leading to racial identification than the crime list does.
Jaafar and Munawar’s comparison is an example of a strong pattern in the most wanted program: Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian nonterrorists are three times more likely to be white than their counterparts on terrorist lists. It is important to note that race labels do not simply change for such people going from nonterrorist to terrorist lists. Rather, race labels disappear altogether. Bodies that are often racialized as the same on the basis of traditional racial proxies of nationality, ethnicity, place of birth, and religion are differentiated from one another on the basis of crime category, as Jaafar and Al-Munawar’s comparison illustrates. The quintessential terrorist—the brown Muslim man—is deracialized. Omi and Winant’s (2014) racial formation theory, specifically their concept of racialization, is typically used to understand race in the war on terror: although Muslims are a religious group, racial meaning is extended to them and to other ethnic and/or religious groups such as Arabs, Hindus, Sikhs, and so on. But on the FBI crime lists, rather than the extending of racial meaning to the new composite, we are seeing a systematic withdrawing of explicit racial meaning. The western colonial concept of race developed to sustain a specific set of material relations, and the systematic deracialization here does that but for a new time when disappearance is the mode of management for the specific problem at hand. The war on terror is managed materially through a constellation of disappearance mechanisms, and as such, the quintessential post-9/11 terrorist is represented as an absence.
On Complexion and Other Proxies
The missing race of the terrorist lists tends to have a category called complexion on their posters. Complexion is another feature, like racelessness, that is relatively unique to terrorist lists. Complexion appears on only 10 percent (35) of all posters. And 28 of the 35 posters with complexion are on a terrorist list. Only seven people in the entire most wanted program have both complexion and race categories. 6 On the basis of these numbers, one could argue that perhaps complexion replaces race. Or one could argue that race is unnecessary to name because complexion offers what feels useful about race as a physical identifier without the messiness of finding the appropriate race label. The next two sections draw out some important details on the finding of deracialization. I discuss three questions tied to such possible counterarguments to deracialization that ultimately prove insufficient to explain the missing race. Specifically: Are the other markers on the missing race’s posters (nationality, citizenship, etc.) proxies for race such that they do not need a race category for identification? Are Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, North Africans, and Middle Eastern people simply difficult to classify racially, leading to many of them missing a race category? Is race missing because it is not a commonly used term in some of the countries with which this general group is associated?
The possibilities implied in these questions have some merit before ultimately falling short. Complexion may indeed provide presumably useful information for apprehension while circumventing the race label issue: indeed, those broadly racialized as Muslim have moved all over the color line in this country, between white and black, and also within white and black, all while the dominant meanings of black and white (and also other frequent and available categories such as Asian and Latino) do not generally refer to those broadly racialized as Muslim (Husain 2019; Maghbouleh 2017; Morning 2001). In this way, they are “difficult” to racially classify into most available categories. However, the challenge of racially classifying groups that have moved around the color line quite a bit does not explain why Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, North Africans, and Middle Eastern people are suddenly systematically classifiable when they are not on terrorist lists (see Table 2). And further, even if an analysis recognizes categories such as nationality and citizenship as serving the identificatory function of race, the systematic removal of the race label remains unaccounted for in such analysis. Even though some of the countries to which “Hispanic” and “Asian” correspond in the American imagination do not have a race category on their census or as a state-recognized mode of identification, FBI wanted posters of people connected to these countries nevertheless have a race category on their poster, so the lack of race as an important classification for some states does not explain the missing race.
Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian People a by Race and Crime List.
I selected individuals from crime lists who bear the following markers of Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African, and/or South Asian status: languages they speak (e.g., Arabic, Hindi, Farsi), their names (e.g., Muhammad, Abdul, etc.), nationality (e.g., Syrian, Turkish, Lebanese, Egyptian, Pakistani), and if they have a most wanted poster in Arabic or another language associated with the relevant regions.
Refers to posters with “white” followed by something more specific in parentheses.
The full wording is “white (Kuwaitian with darker complexion than photographed above).” All race categories mentioned in this article with reference to the posters are using the language of the FBI and not my own unless otherwise specified.
Hard to Classify? “Asian” and “White (Hispanic)”
If the racelessness of the terrorist and its complexion category could be explained by virtue of nonblack and nonwhite people being difficult to classify, then perhaps Asians and Latinos, as other racial middle groups, would have a systematically missing race and systematically present complexion category. But they do not. Those whom the FBI labels “Asian” and “white (Hispanic)” on the lists have also been theorized as racially ambiguous or as occupying an intermediate racial position (Alcoff 2003; Beydoun 2013; Golash-Boza and Darity 2008). Eleven percent of people in the FBI’s most wanted program are classified as black, and 30 percent are classified as white. 7 Fifty-nine percent of the program is neither “black” nor “white” 8 (see Table 3).
All Individuals Classified as Neither “Black” nor “White” a by Race and Crime List.
These are FBI categories.
The full wording is “white (Kuwaitian with darker complexion than photographed above).” All race categories mentioned in this article with reference to the posters are using the language of the FBI and not my own unless otherwise specified.
There are a few patterns with regard to this 59 percent racial middle that further suggest that the missing race cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by recognizing that most of them are neither black nor white. When considering all who bear markers of “Hispanic” ethnicity on the basis of name, language, nationality, and citizenship, only one person who could be classified as Hispanic is missing race. Half of the racial middle is labeled “white (Hispanic),” and they are highly concentrated on the additional violent crimes and violent crimes–murders lists specifically. Only three are on a terrorist list. Out of the four people who could be classified as “white (Hispanic)” but are not, one is a Brazilian national missing a race category, another is an Ecuadorian national classified as “white,” and the two remaining have the term Hispanic in their race category: an American national is classified as “biracial (Hispanic and white)” and another American national as “black (Hispanic).” These details suggest that the systematically missing race for terrorists is not a factor of their racial ambiguity in the U.S. racial landscape, or nonblack nonwhite status, since Latinos or “Hispanics” share these statuses but are rarely missing race.
Asians are also not systematically missing a race category. Leaving aside Middle Eastern (West Asian) and South Asian people for a moment, there are only four individuals who are missing race who could be classified as Asian: four members of the People’s Liberation Army in China on the cyber’s most wanted list, one person born in the Philippines on the most wanted terrorists list, and another born in the Philippines on the violent crimes–murder list. Filipinos occupy a racial position in which they have been classified at times as Asian or as Latino, giving them a racial position in the United States that appears to “break the rules of race” (Ocampo 2016). Complexity notwithstanding, even Filipinos are not consistently missing race, as three other Filipinos on the wanted lists are racially classified as Asian.
In short, Latinos and Asians do not have a consistent missing race. And even for the few who are missing race, the missingness is not patterned by some other feature, like the type of crime with which they are associated, as is the case for Arab, Muslim, South Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern people. Out of the 57 people missing race across the entire 2017 most wanted program, all but 11 are Arab, South Asian, Middle Eastern, North African, and/or Muslim. This suggests a pattern of missing race in which the missingness of a race category is not only attributable to the challenges of classifying the racially ambiguous in the U.S. racial imagination. Rather, it is better understood as part of the representational life of the material governance of terrorism.
Paradoxically, public safety from terrorism after 9/11 is represented as dependent on the identification of an unidentifiable, hidden enemy. For example, terrorists are represented as operating in sleeper cells or hiding in plain sight. The phrase “secret Muslim,” which was most famously circulated to undermine Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, suggests that the problem is not only Muslim but also concealed. In combination with the explicitly racial removal of the missing race, the FBI helps produce the terrorist as removed generally by making the slippery concept of terrorism their highest priority, as the next section discusses. In Stampnitzky’s (2013) study of terror experts, one expert described attempts to define the concept as “trying to nail pudding to a wall” (p. 45). When the enemy is unidentifiable, increasingly extreme measures to attempt to identify and capture the enemy make good sense to the American public that is hailed by the FBI’s most wanted program. The missing race category symbolically suggests that such people cannot be identified using our categories and our traditional means of identifying people. Race is not a reflection of natural difference but a production of difference that is then considered natural. So here the racialization of the terrorist appears strange but is also a classic case of the deployment of race in ways that serve the purpose of the racial project at hand, in this case, the war on terror.
Dissent as Terrorism
The quintessential terrorist of the most wanted terrorists list is deracialized, but four people on that terrorists list have a race category on their posters, and all 15 people on the domestic terrorism list have a race category as well. I turn here to these cases and argue that race appears to police the line between “us” and “the terrorists” through not only the withdrawal of racial meaning, as the previous section explains, but also in the symbolic appearance of relatively lower priority anticolonial, anticapitalist actors on the domestic terrorism list. The following illustrates how the war on terror is a capitalist, colonial project. Terrorism retains earlier, mid-twentieth century associations with anticolonial, anticapitalist politics even as the definition of terrorism remains contested and associated with the 9/11 moment.
Most of the people on the domestic terrorism list are there for crimes that took place between the late 1960s and early 1980s, except for two people involved with Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front in the 1990s. The majority of domestic terrorists’ posters mention membership in either the May 19th Communist Organization or Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional of Puerto Rico, or the posters name anticolonial movement hubs Cuba and Algeria as the destinations toward which the pictured hijacker directed the hijacked plane. There are four black people on the domestic terrorist list, eight white people, and three “white (Hispanic)” people. The difference between the domestic and the most wanted terrorists list does not appear to be domestic or foreign birth, nationality, or citizenship. In fact, there are several people with Canadian birth and citizenship whose posters describe their participation in “a French Canadian Separatist Movement” who are on the domestic list. Rewards for information leading to the capture of domestic terrorists are at the level of most nonterrorists—either in the low hundred thousands or no reward—in contrast to the millions in rewards on the most wanted terrorists list. This suggests that perhaps their presence on the domestic terrorist list is less a matter of FBI priority in locating the individual and more to police what the individual represents. Symbolically, it is useful for their race to be named to signify the nature of their crimes related to their anticolonial, anticapitalist politics. And further, as largely unambiguously white and black people according to the dominant meanings of blackness and whiteness, listing their race is uncontroversial and more likely helpful for facilitating identification and capture than for those on the most wanted terrorists list.
Although there are several white people on the domestic terrorist list and two on the most wanted terrorists list, none are there for white supremacist politics. The comparison between Assata Shakur (Joanne Deborah Chesimard on her poster; Figure 3) and Timothy Thomas Coombs (Figure 4) illustrates the line between terrorism and white supremacy for the FBI: Shakur is a most wanted terrorist, but Coombs is not. The comparison between them is revealing because their cases otherwise share some key features: both are accused of police-related crimes, both alleged crimes occurred before 9/11, and both are members of political organizations associated with their respective racial groups. Both are also U.S. born and with race categories on their posters. The similarities stop there.
Assata Shakur’s wanted poster.
Timothy Thomas Coombs’s wanted poster.
Coombs is on the additional violent crimes list and is raced as white on his poster, while Shakur is on the most wanted terrorists list and labeled as black. Coombs’s poster reads that he “reportedly maintains very radical, anti-government, white supremacist beliefs, and is associated with the Christian Identity Movement.” He is the only person in my archive whose poster names a connection to an explicitly white supremacist organization. He was charged with first-degree assault of a police officer, and the poster offers some details: he shot a police officer “in the chest” in 1994 “while the officer was standing in his [own] rural Missouri home.” It continues, “Although the officer was seriously injured, he survived the attack. It is believed that the shooting was in retaliation for the officer’s arrest of a man who was an acquaintance of Coombs.” The detail about retaliation is remarkably understanding in comparison with the description of Shakur, who is described as “part of a revolutionary extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Army” who then with her two “accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range.” Unlike Coombs’s poster, Shakur’s poster lacks a description of motive, though she was also concerned with her “acquaintances” at the scene, and the police killed one of them in this encounter (Shakur 2001).
The Black Liberation Army and the Christian Identity Movement are racially defined organizations, but this is not to say that they are corresponding organizations in goals, values, or means. They are absolutely not. Rather, it is to say that if Shakur and Coombs were both being classified by the FBI on the basis of their political memberships and alleged crimes, then the FBI could argue that both shot police officers and are members of radical organizations associated with their race, and thus both are terrorists or both are fugitives. But the difference between them on the posters suggests that the FBI is not a neutral, apolitical arbiter of a neutral, apolitical category called terrorism. By classifying him as a fugitive rather than a terrorist, Coombs’s political goals are normalized, framed as an undesirable but relatively smaller threat—even though he is explicitly “antigovernment,” and his poster says so—whereas Shakur’s are framed as urgent, high priority, and far more threatening. Urgency is conveyed through the monetary reward for information leading to capture: the reward for information on Shakur is 10 times the price on Coombs’s head. The role of priority for the FBI’s selection process is the main argument of Thomas J. Miles’s (2008) research on the length of time that individuals remained on the ten most wanted fugitives list since 1950. He argued that as posters were publicized in more venues and as the range of criminal activity the FBI was interested in widened, the FBI increasingly used its posters to communicate its priorities rather than to locate fugitives. Miles found that even though the official criteria for placing individuals on wanted lists has not changed since 1950, the types of people and crimes of interest have changed since then, which suggests an implicit shift in the criteria with regard to priority. Further suggesting the role of priority, his research shows that the fraction of fugitives arrested as a result of a specific tip or surrender has fallen drastically since the 1950s, when it was over 40 percent, and faced a sharp decline in the 1970s. And in the mid-2000s, the fraction of arrests based on tips or surrender was only about 20 percent. The rate of apprehension has remained relatively stable since this time, but the rate based on the distribution of posters has declined. Although about the ten most wanted fugitives list specifically, Miles’s research may be extended to consider the role of priority and the FBI’s racial logic when it comes to terrorism if we consider the rewards offered for capture for individuals as a measure of the FBI’s priorities. The reward for capture for people on the ten most wanted fugitives list in the 2017 most wanted program was $100,000 for all but one person, whose reward was set for $200,000. Like the ten most wanted fugitives list, the most wanted terrorists list signifies priority in its very name, but it is worth noting that it is larger than 10 people and with rewards in the millions. Seventy nine percent of most wanted terrorists have rewards in the millions. The highest reward is $25 million. Furthermore, on the rest of the nonterrorist lists, only three people have rewards in the millions, and the highest is $5 million.
White supremacists are not terrorists in the FBI’s most wanted program. There are some individual white people on all terrorist lists, but not for having politics or committing crimes related to white supremacy. Self-identified white supremacists are not represented as a threat to the state in the way that a terrorist is, even when these individuals call themselves antistate, and even when the state itself reports this finding. It is worth noting here as well, in contrast to Coombs, that some domestic terrorists are not even accused of killing anyone. Rather, the destruction or attempted destruction of property is their crime. The FBI’s classification practices renew, through a different register, the colonial, imperial right of the state to make a display of punishing political actors who challenge capitalism, U.S. colonialism, racism, and other major pillars on which the state stands. The political actors of the domestic terrorist list who are connected to explicitly antiracist movements are not the kind of antiracist whose critiques can be incorporated or coopted into the state’s official antiracism (Melamed 2011). They are not part of movements whose central demands are greater representation in government, for example. Rather, they reject inclusion for radical social and political change—in some cases, nonviolently. Their anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist politics are at once an important part of the warrant for classifying them as terrorists. And at the same time, these are politics that would not be controversial in most politically progressive circles.
Because terrorism is not typically associated with the white race, liberal perspectives on terrorism often suggest that the state is being inconsistent in its classifications of violence: that the state should be classifying violent white actors as terrorists as well. In this, however, there is the assumption that terrorism is a narrow classification and that it inherently suggests atrocity. Although the term has that tenor in contemporary popular discourse, analysis of the FBI most wanted program suggests that we cannot take this popular understanding of terrorism as unthinkable violence at face value. If the most wanted program is a site for the production and definition of terrorism, findings show that terrorism is actually a very diverse category composed of diverse politics and actions including Al-Qaeda leadership responsible for killing civilians in the thousands; heroic symbols of Black liberation such as Assata Shakur, who has always maintained her innocence (Shakur 2001); and environmental activists such as Joseph Dibee, who believes in the sanctity of all life and who does not even stand accused by the FBI of killing anyone. This research shows that the categorization of terrorism is not neutral; it is a removal from “us,” per George W. Bush’s post-9/11 framework that you are either with us or you are with the terrorists, and in doing so, a strengthening of the violence on which this “us” stands. This research has shown how race is used to police that line between “us” and “the terrorists,” and how the state itself is not neutral in its classificatory practices. To call for the classification of white supremacists as terrorists is to attempt to disaggregate a word from the colonial baggage that makes it a powerful word in the first place. Such an approach poses little challenge to the war on terror. Rather, it further guts the legitimacy of anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist critiques that are actually up to the task.
Conclusion
I have shown here that FBI representations of the terrorist as removed and exceptionally violent or dangerous rely on the deployment of “race” in ways that correspond to disappearance and removal as material modes of governance in the war on terror. Such representation helps to render the state’s extreme antiterror apparatus as neutral and legitimate and to continually renew the colonial and capitalist state through the different register of terrorism.
Whereas “missing data” plague many a sociological study, the systematically selective absence of a race category for those classified as terrorists is the first main empirical story of this study. I find that terrorism shapes racial categorization not through the use of a different or new race label for the terrorist, but by removing one. It is the removal of racial meaning, rather than the application of racial meaning per Omi and Winant’s widely used concept of racialization to theorize race and Muslims, that is the mark of the highest priority terrorists here. It could be argued that such terrorists’ Muslim names, foreign nationality, citizenship, and other markers are proxies for race. And although that may be the case insofar as these have utility for identification purposes, the absence of a race label remains a meaningful, systematic choice in the FBI’s most wanted program. Rather than hunting for race proxies, I am more interested in the significance of the apparent racelessness: it is a systematic choice that symbolically communicates and creates the removal and exceptionality of the terrorist. To quickly summarize, I considered and rejected several possible explanations for the missing race. First, I considered whether the race is missing because they are Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African, and/or South Asian, which would suggest that all such people across the entire program would also be missing a race category: but those on nonterrorists lists do have race, so such ethnic, geographic, and religious statuses are not a strong explanation. Second and relatedly, I considered whether it is because this group is racially ambiguous in the U.S. racial imagination: but other ambiguous (read neither black nor white) groups also have race. After considering these possibilities, I conclude that the status of terrorist speaks loudest for racial (non)attribution. Most significant here is that most wanted terrorists are not simply given another race; their race is removed entirely. I argue here that this deracialization is a way that the state engages race to produce the terrorist as removed and exceptional.
In this article I contribute an analysis of racial categorization practices that emphasize not how categorization appears arbitrary, mysterious, and uneven—which is sometimes how the phrase “social construction of race” is misused or misunderstood to suggest—but instead emphasizes the ideological work of racial categorization in the interest of a goal or specifically racial project. If race is a classificatory system that furthers the material interests of those dominant within a social structure, then we must be attentive to new interests or new ways in which older interests are furthered. In other words, the logic of accumulation of racial capitalism also structures categorization practices such that new and different ways of classifying are necessary in order to create new markets, gain control of resources, and other capitalist projects (Rana 2011; Robinson 1983). The racial removal of the terrorist facilitates the physical and symbolic removal of the terrorist and anything with which they are associated.
Terrorism is a flexible category that helps place politics that the state wishes to police as being as outside of “us” as possible, as removed, or as exceptional, as the second major finding suggests. Important distinctions between popular movements and individual political actors, or between the killing of civilians and the killing of police or other representatives of the state, collapse in the FBI’s classification of terrorism. Earlier mid-twentieth century associations of terrorism with anticolonialism and anticapitalism appear to be accumulating in step with the expansion of the security state rather than being displaced. The primary implication of this research is to highlight this reality. A brief list of those called terrorists, whether by the state or not, includes students protesting confederate statues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Marchello 2018), the many black working-class residents of New Orleans trying to survive in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (Adams 2013), environmental activists fighting corporations that are hastening ecological disaster, and Black Lives Matter activists called black identity extremists. This research shows how people and politics so different from one another can be situated into the same register of terrorism through processes that engage race in unusual ways. This research suggests that rather than attempting to make terrorism a more inclusive category—as it is already quite capacious—we interrogate the boundary that terrorism is invoked to police.