Laura Khoury

How does granting certificates of ‘business clean of Arab workers’ to owners of shops, stores, and Jewish businesses who prove they are not employing Arab workers shape identity? Identity development involves making sense of, and coming to terms with, the social world one inhabits, recognizing choices and making decisions within contexts, and finding a sense of unity within one's self while claiming a place in the world. Since there is no objective, ahistoric, universal trans-cultural identity, views of identity must be historically and culturally situated. This paper explores identity issues among members of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. While there is a body of literature exploring this subject, we will offer a different perspective by contextualizing the political and economic contexts that form an essential foundation for understanding identity formation among this minority group. We argue that, as a genre of settler colonialism, ‘pure settlement colonies’ involve the conquering not only of land, but of labor as well, excluding the natives from the economy. Such an exclusion from the economy is significant for its cultural, social, and ideological consequences, and therefore is especially significant in identity formation discussed in the paper. We briefly review existing approaches to the study of identity among Palestinian Arabs in Israel, and illustrate our theoretical contextual framework. Finally, we present and discuss findings from a new study of identity among Palestinian Arab college students in Israel through the lens of this framework.

This study, carried out in a barrio neighborhood near the U.S.-Mexican border, uses a structural violence perspective to understand the extent of and individual determinants of mistreatment of residents by immigration authorities. Results indicate that barrio residents are more likely than the U.S. population in general to experience mistreatment at the hands of state authorities. Multivariate analyses indicate that authorities dole out mistreatment especially to people who appear Mexican. Educated Latinos are also frequent targets of mistreatment, and being a native-born or naturalized U.S. citizen offers no protection. These results suggest an institutional pattern of state violence in barrios structured more by racism and nativism than by immigration status.

Racial profiling is a unique regime of social control specifically due to its reinvention of blackness as a signifier to criminality. The author argues that the ‘new black’ (or new non‐white) is reconstructed under this regime when previous regimes did not necessarily criminalize whole groups. This study employs panopticism, and its critique by Foucault, to argue that racial profiling as dressage aims to increase the visibility of black people – control minorities. Its different practices (like Driving While Black) aim to normalize, assimilate, and rehabilitate everyone to one centre. It is done by means of penetrating the consciousness through continuous surveillance, thereby making the black individual an obedient citizen. The article argues also that the expression of social control in the racial profiling regime is spatial too. This means that space is classified so that some activities are criminal only if they occur in the ghetto, or at the borders of white neighbourhoods. Racial profiling serves as a reminder of the black people's ‘place’. Thus, it is all about the perpetual visibility of the modern individual. The author argues that racial profiling is designed to enhance this visibility. Racial profiling is not the first regime to occur; it succeeded three preceding social control regimes: slavery, Jim Crow, and mass imprisonment. All these regimes are a manifestation of a fundamental structural fault of modern society: racism and inequality. That is the modern state surveillance function. So, the question addressed here is: how does surveillance through police practices shape the modern subject (how is the subject socially produced)?