Thanks to Professor Getachew for an insightful engagement with my most recent work. I will try to answer her questions in turn.

Regarding the first question, the two motivations for writing this book were to illuminate neglected primary materials to demonstrate, contrary to what I had been taught and told for a good portion of my career, that race, more specifically racial hierarchy, never had a place in the field of comparative politics. More substantively, I conceived of The Spectre of Race as an opportunity to explore the relationship between racial politics, political institutions, and democracy in a manner that emphasized how members of dominant groups in nominally democratic polities used law, ideology, norms, and a good bit of coercion to maintain their dominance. Explanations for how presumed racial or ethnonational difference are rendered salient in politics require attention to dynamics that often escape an analytic lens focusing mostly on political economy and material conditions.

Second, I view racial hierarchy along with ethnonational hierarchy as serving similar purposes, specifically, marginalization in society, economy, and the polity. Both ethnicity and race are constructed categories and relational in actual human relations. Why are certain groups characterized as ethnic groups, while others are classified as racial groups? The very distinction in many plural societies is itself constituted in politics. Ultimately what matters most is how each is deployed in politics and ideology to assign certain characteristics to some people and not others, characteristics that are relevant for getting a good job and for being able to marry a person from another group, to receive a substantive education, and to obtain good housing and relative freedom from what Phillip Pettit refers to as arbitrary domination. Where Professor Mamdani’s work and my own may intersect in this regard is in his explication of the bifurcated state that (1) codifies the distinction between citizen and subject and (2) uses a scheme of ethnic favoritism to privilege (this term is used relatively here) certain groups and not others. I refer to such state-led policy at least in the United States as the enactment of a dualist regime, a unitary state that devises schemes of population management that correlate with racial and ethnonational hierarchy.

Lastly, I want to attend to Getachew’s final question about the implications of racial regimes for understanding contemporary democracies. In the United States, gerrymandering and the stripping away of voting rights from those housed in the prison-industrial complex are two obvious examples of the effect of racial hierarchy on political participation. Highly selective and restrictive immigration policies designed to limit settlement and paths to citizenship are extensions of the racial and ethno-national regimes imposed in broader society. The long-standing assumption I examine in the book—namely, that the occupants of the state apparatus must be of the same stock as the citizenry—endures into the twenty-first century, evidenced in the xenophobic, right-wing backlash against black, brown, migrant, and Muslim populations attempting to enter Europe or the United States.

Finally, Sheldon Wolin characterized democracy as fugitive, most viable when in the hands of a collectivity, and not in formal, representative government. Current popular mobilization in Hong Kong against the authoritarian prerogatives of the Chinese state is one example. Popular mobilization against fascist organizations allied with state power, in Hungary, Poland and the United States, exemplify some of the most challenging forms of plural, democratic articulations against the combination of popular and governmental racisms that seek to transform the very idea and reality of a people in a nation-state. Part of what I argue in The Spectre of Race is that democratic polities rarely start out as plural communities, but are often pushed in the direction of political and cultural pluralism only as a result of political and social struggle, not some telos intrinsic to democracy itself.