Matiangai Sirleaf and Jaya Ramji-Nogales discuss relationship between race and national security

When Sheila Vélez Martínez asked Matiangai Sirleaf to explain the connection between race and national security, she emphasized how closely related the two topics truly are.

“Race has always been essential to thinking about national security,” Sirleaf said. “To the extent it’s been obscured, which I think it has, I think we need to interrogate that and I think we need to figure out why that is.”

The Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice hosted an event titled “How Does Race Manifest in National Security” in the Barco Law Building on Friday afternoon. The event featured Matiangai Sirleaf, the Nathan Patz professor of law at the University of Maryland, and Jaya Ramji-Nogales, the I. Herman Stern professor of law at Temple University. They discussed topics in the recently published book “Race and National Security,” which Sirleaf and Ramji-Nogales both contributed to.

After Sirleaf and Ramji-Nogales read passages from the book, Vélez Martínez, co-director of the Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice, began the discussion by asking the panelists to explain the importance of linking race and national security together.

Sirleaf noted the absence of race in textbooks on national security.

“What you tend to find, as national security is taught, is that race is sort of marginalized and relegated as some sort of obscure, unique subject that is not central to understanding the discipline,” Sirleaf said. “I think that that is not unintentional.”

Ramji-Nogales said she is concerned about the “national security framework” used in political discourse to justify private and state violence.

“I think it’s really important to excavate what the white supremacy is doing to construct that national security framework and the work that national security does for white supremacy,” Ramji-Nogales said. “It’s a very powerful way to paint the other as a threat when, frankly, more often than not, the threat has come from white supremacy toward people of color.”

Sirleaf cited the war in Ukraine to illustrate how “whiteness was used explicitly by Ukrainians to garner support for the nature of their threat” and how immigration laws favored Ukrainian refugees over other populations facing “similar security threats.”

“We can think about multiple instances in which race and racism are playing very informative roles, even though there is sort of a failure to engage with that explicitly,” Sirleaf said.

Vélez Martínez asked why the national security conversation is centered around migration instead of trafficking or other, more traditional national security elements. Ramji-Nogales responded by saying “trace the power, trace the money” and cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Hernández v. Mesa as well as Operation Wetback — an Eisenhower-era mass deportation campaign conducted by Border Patrol.

“[Border Patrol] painted the people coming from Mexico as criminals and prostitutes, that the Border Patrol was protecting labor, and so this threat was manufactured and we have this theater of enforcement that creates Mexican-Americans as perpetual foreigners, and we still see this to this day,” Ramji-Nogales said. “We can pay for night-vision goggles at the border, but we can’t fund an immigration court adjudicator, so we see the way the money flows.”

Vélez Martínez followed up Ramji-Nogales’ response by asking how pandemic-era policies relate to race and national security. Sirleaf responded, saying “The history of global health is based on racialized threats of contagion.”

“The stereotypes of people of color being particularly diseased, I think we saw this early during the pandemic, and that informed a bunch of our policies,” Sirleaf said. “The pandemic, I think, has continued to expose fissures that were already there, but were rendered, I think, more apparently so, and so instead of being this sort of great equalizer that I think some of us had hoped, it just laid bare divisions along racialized lines in really stark ways.”

When asked about how policing policies influence national security policies, Sirleaf said there’s a connection between the abundant funding for police and war, but a lack of funding to provide healthcare, childcare, food and housing.

“Our domestic policies, which call for a massive expansion of the security state, are related to our foreign policy, which calls for a massive expansion of the security state,” Sirleaf said. “The weaponry, even, that is used in our foreign interventions all over make their way back to the streets of Portland, to Baltimore and the like, and oftentimes you see the same people who sort of have retired from the military who then become cops, and even if it’s not the same people, certainly the same material is being used — whether it’s weapons, whether it’s tanks on our streets and the like.”

Vélez Martínez’s final question asked the panelists to reflect on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas and its relation to race and national security.

“There’s a way in which race and racism are functioning, clearly, and the Israeli government is quite clear about that,” Sirleaf said. “The leader has talked about the children of light versus the children of darkness and talking about tropes that are clearly racialized in ways that I think are quite concerning.”

Sirleaf called the United States’ response “catastrophic” and said the moment feels “very gaslit.”

“The dehumanizing language that’s happening is, again, very evident,” Sirleaf said. “The language that is being used — we’re not dealing with humans, we’re dealing with human animals — and nobody in the Biden administration is checking that or responding to that in ways that are quite fearsome.”

When the moderated discussion ended, the panelists answered audience questions. One audience member asked how “white elites” benefit from the current understanding of race and national security. Ramji-Nogales said the system works to create “cheap and disposable labor” as well as a “control of violence.”

“During the BLM protests … I remember in Philadelphia they surrounded city hall with National Guard,” Ramji-Nogales said. “And then January 6, no one takes seriously. Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, these white supremacists, let them play.’ So it’s about what gets obscured and where the focus is turned in terms of what’s a national security threat.”

Sirleaf said the benefit is a “perception of security.”

“Security at the expense of keeping marginalized groups surveilled, subject to violence, subject to threats, subject to torture, subject to death, and that freedom of not being subject to those things I think is something that goes unspoken, but all of this is supposed to protect someone, and it’s at the expense of someone,” Sirleaf said.

After the event, Jonathan Hafetz, a professor of law at Seton Hall University, said he attended the discussion because he finds the intersection of race and national security “fascinating.”

“It’s a subject that I’ve focused on myself a good deal [while] working, for example, in the national security space defending Guantanamo detainees and writing about issues in Guantanamo and indefinite detention,” Hafetz said. “I think it’s a really important field which impacts a number of different areas — immigration, things like the pandemic response, foreign policy — so I think, really, this frame informs approaches to a lot of different issues.”