#Skin deep ink skin
#Skin deep ink upgrade
#Skin deep ink full
#Skin deep ink code

If these events sound familiar-either through hyperboles of the present or indices of history that I track in my endnotes-they should. The burning of their clothes mirrors the actions of a militant White supremacist group, “Cleanse America.” The group kidnaps inks and dumps them on the other side of the US-Mexico border, and later lights “emergent neighborhoods that still rent to inks” on fire. Inks are then led to a “mandatory shower” and their clothing incinerated. Sanitariums are opened across the country to detain and monitor “shipment” of inks suspected of harboring diseases, including “Chagas…and Hansen’s.” At these “inkatoriums”-medical facilities turned detention centers-global positioning system (GPS) chips are embedded in the necks of every ink. This mode of racialization points to a pathogenic, microscopic threat below the skin’s surface to generate fear. These narratives are deployed to round them up, tear their families apart, sell their children off in private adoptions, and force sterilize men and women alike. įalse narratives from health officials propagate the idea that inks carry disease. Even though inks get faux tattoos to fly under the radar, while others are simply white-passing and use “instaskin” to cover their tattoos and evade systems of control, the requirement of non-whites to make their citizenship status visible represents an explicit exercise of the racial logics of biopower.

#Skin deep ink full

In the not-so-distance future, an “identity law” is passed to differentiate temporary workers (black), permanent residents (green), and non-white citizens (blue)-collectively known as “inks”-from those with full European ancestry using color-coded, biometric tattoos.

#Skin deep ink upgrade

This shift in scale, along with “the turn to biometrics” in South Africa, identified by film, television, and journalism scholar Jane Duncan, marks a technological upgrade in surveillance states across the globe that enforce draconian processes of “social sorting.” What we are dealing with is the use of technological devices and methods of empirical data collection to not only define criminality but to stand in for and lend credence to racial logics: the differentiation of humans through the valuation of biological characteristics at smaller and smaller scales of measurement.īut what happens when this inner “truth” of race at the genomic level is reinscribed on the skin’s surface by governmental agencies? How do we respond when these markings racialize migrant bodies as pathogenic to justify their containment? Such is the speculative imaginary of Sabrina Vourvoulias’s Ink (2014). Towards the end of her 2014 monograph, gender, performance, and ethnic studies scholar Rachel Lee identifies several changes in the landscape of racial thinking during our “(epi-) genomic age.” While epidermal notions of race persist, “microscopically coded (genomic) markers” penetrate deeper to allow for multiscalar means of human differentiation under new regimes of science.

#Skin deep ink skin

In the 21 st century, race runs more than skin deep. Under the rule of the Department of Justice, the use of biometrics marks racialized bodies as the scene of the crime from which government agencies can lawfully harvest genetic material.

Genetic information is collected and fed into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database touted as “a tool for linking violent crimes” whenever “biological evidence is recovered from the crime scene.” When applied to border subjects, these biometrics shore up containment measures and mark undocumented migrants as potential repeat offenders, a foreclosing of their futures that serves the ends of biopolitical control.

#Skin deep ink code

Department of Justice proposed a rule titled “DNA-Sample Collection From Immigration Detainees.” The rule would remove one Obama-era exception in the Code of Federal Regulations to the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005: an exception that dismisses DNA collection as a requirement if institutional funds are limited. Salvador Herrera // On October 22 nd, 2019, the U.S.