Deconstructing the Deconstruction.doc

Having read, with interest, an article by Allison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit, “Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School”, I discovered that it contains a most fascinating example of academic racialization that a scholar of race and ethnicity would find hard, if not outright impossible, to ignore.

Setting the ambitious goal of deconstructing the securitization theory and unveiling its “racist foundations” to the world for the first time, the authors undertake painstaking work: they extract rather startling elements from the theory they are working with (one of the central elements among them is “silence”), in order to assemble them into racist discourse and then subject said discourse to crushing criticism. In this brief essay, I shall attempt to deconstruct the aforementioned deconstruction, and thereby demonstrate that:

1) the theory criticized by A. Howell and M. Richter-Montpetit, is in fact new racist discourse;

2) the aim of racializing the securitization theory was to accrue academic capital;

3) the racialization of theories that were not originally racist adds more racism to the academic discourse.