Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Abstract

Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call “victorious whiteness”, “infinite whiteness” and “static blackness” assembled by the Commission on Training Camp Activities, and an “advancing blackness” pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20th-century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.