Biopower and political racism: an analysis from Michel Foucault

Abstract

Ever since men realized that experimenting new treatments and drugs on humans could contribute to an improvement of living conditions, human beings have been tested as Guinea pigs. Despite all the benefits it might provide to science, many have produced victims. Furthermore, scientific and individual interests might be conflicting, generating ethical complications, such as what happened in the Tuskegee Case, a study on the evolution of syphilis. After narrating this case, the present article intends to establish a connection with Foucault’s ideas on Biopower. Biopower has begun with the advent of capitalism and a health and medical system designed to control diseases and information, promote public hygiene and sanitation. Imbued with such role, medicine starts to take control over the population’s use of the bodies and the health care maintenance. Other ideas discussed here are the motives behind Tuskegee, emphasized by Foucault, as the usage of power and the function of death in a political system that is centered on Biopower. The term racism, used by Foucault, includes difference in races or color, media-imposed beauty and intellectual standards, social and economic differences, exclusion, imprisonment, abandonment. The differences between relations of power and of constraint according to Foucault’s view are also discussed. For him, there is no balance of power without resistance. However, wherever there is domination, resistance becomes inoperative.