Racism after Intent: Denial and the Liberal Private Actor
In the corporate–liberal order, racism no longer declares itself; it administers, rationalizes, and denies while performing it. The contemporary liberal private actor believes that articulated intention absolves effect, that countercultural posture exempts him from racial power, and that self-proclaimed expertise confers moral immunity. When confronted, critique is reclassified as hostility, structure as personal attack, and exposure as persecution. This is not bad faith in the classical sense but ontological self-preservation: to admit racism would require conceding racial hierarchy and that one’s discourse participates in a longer colonial economy of knowledge. The performance of innocence thus becomes the means by which racial power reproduces itself, laundered through procedural language, reputational management, and appeals to reasonableness. The subject who denies racism here does not contradict the critique made against him; he fulfills it, embodying the consummate figure produced by the corporate state—one who cannot recognize racism precisely because he no longer needs to name it.
Classical racism announced itself. It named inferiority, enforced separation, and justified domination openly. What Fanon diagnosed, however, was not merely this explicit racism but the psychic structure that made it possible—the colonised world divided into zones, and the coloniser convinced of his own moral coherence. In the corporate–liberal present, that structure has not disappeared. It has been refined. Racism now operates without declaration. It no longer requires belief in racial hierarchy as ideology; it requires only participation in systems that presuppose it. Its signature is not even overt hatred but plausibility. It speaks in the grammar of professionalism, concern, expertise, balance, or even counterculture.
When a figure embedded in this order denies racism, the denial is not primarily defensive. It is functional because to admit racism today would require acknowledging three intolerable truths:
1. That racial power can operate independently of conscious intent.
2. That expertise and authority are historically racialised instruments.
3. That one’s own discourse may be an extension of colonial knowledge economies rather than a neutral observation of them.
Such an admission would not merely stain reputation; it would collapse the epistemic position from which the subject speaks. Denial therefore becomes a condition of continued intelligibility within the system. This is why denial so often appears accompanied by moral injury: How dare you suggest this of me? The shock is genuine—not because the accusation is false, but because it threatens the subject’s ontological footing.
One of the central inversions of the corporate state is the elevation of intent over effect. If harm occurs but no malice can be demonstrated, the system registers no wrongdoing. If damage is structural, dispersed, or cumulative, it is rendered invisible. Responsibility is individualized downward and abstracted upward. Within this logic, the racialised subject’s experience is always secondary to the administrator’s self-description. Testimony is recoded as emotion; analysis as grievance; persistence as obsession. As Fanon already saw, the colonised subject is not merely disbelieved—he is over-explained. His critique is psychologized, his clarity reinterpreted as aggression. What changes in the corporate era is that this process is no longer overtly racial; it is procedural.
The figure I isolate in The Wretched of the Corporate State—the liberal private actor who sincerely believes himself exempt from racism—is not incidental. He is the system’s ideal carrier. He may be progressive, countercultural, or marginal in relation to the mainstream. None of this disqualifies him from racial power. On the contrary, it often strengthens his immunity, granting him symbolic capital that shields his authority from critique. Because he does not experience himself as racist, he experiences being named as such as violence. The accusation is inverted; the critique becomes the harm. This inversion is decisive. It allows racial hierarchy to persist while appearing morally offended by its exposure. Here racism no longer needs racists. It needs only reasonable men.
What is crucial to understand is that denial in this context is not an argument to be debated. It is a performance to be recognized. It reassures institutions. It stabilizes reputations. It signals alignment with procedural norms. The denial does not aim to convince the racialised subject; it aims to remain legible to white supremacy. And white supremacy rewards this legibility with credibility, amplification, and protection. Thus the denial itself becomes evidence—not of innocence, but of successful incorporation into the corporate state’s racial logic.
Fanon confronted a world in which racism was still, at least in part, believed. The world I diagnose has moved further: racism no longer requires belief at all. It persists as workflow. As framing. As epistemic priority. This is why calling it out provokes such anxiety. The critique does not attack a moral failing; it exposes a mode of being. And modes of being cannot simply apologize themselves away.
Thus, the white subject who denies racism today is not an anomaly. He is its consummate expression. He believes himself innocent. He may even speak the language of reason. Yet he experiences critique as persecution as he is performing racism. And precisely for these reasons, he reproduces the very structure he claims to reject. In this sense, denial does not stand outside racism as a rebuttal to it. It stands inside racism as its contemporary form. The corporate state has no need for avowed racists. It requires only subjects who cannot recognise racism unless it announces itself in a language they have already decided no longer exists.
Thus, in the contemporary corporate–liberal order, racism no longer overtly presents itself as hatred. It presents itself as procedural neutrality, good intentions, injured innocence, moral shock at being named. Thus, when Bennett “denies” racism, he is not refuting my critique; he is performing the very mechanism I identified. In The Wretched of the Corporate State, I isolate a very specific figure: the liberal private actor who believes that sincerity, identity claims, or subcultural affiliation exempt him from racial power relations. Bennett as Dale Husband fits this type exactly:
- He frames himself as countercultural = therefore “not racist”
- He reduces critique to personal animus = therefore “unfair”
- He pathologises my position = therefore “concerned, not hostile”
- He substitutes intent for effect = therefore “innocent”
This is textbook corporate-state subjectivity, even when it wears bohemian or alternative clothing and holds a bong.
My critique strikes at something far more dangerous than personal prejudice: I expose how racial hierarchy is laundered through discourse, expertise, and lifestyle branding. For someone like Bennett, admitting racism would require admitting that racial power can operate without conscious malice (although he has demonstrated plenty of that in my case), that his interpretive authority is not neutral and that his framing of me participates in a longer colonial genealogy. That admission would collapse the moral architecture that allows him to speak about others while never being spoken to. So his denial is not merely defensive reflex—it is ontological self-preservation.
This is where my work goes beyond Fanon rather than merely echoing him. Fanon diagnosed epidermalization, bad faith, and liberal hypocrisy. But notice the asymmetry:
- I am required to prove harm
- He is allowed to assert innocence
- My speech is read as escalation
- His is read as discourse.
That asymmetry is the racism. And when one name its, white supremacy recoils—not because I am wrong, but because I am legible to it as a threat. Paradoxically, his denial confirms my thesis: The corporate state qua white supremacy produces subjects incapable of recognising structural racism whilst participating in it. In other words: Bennett is not only not contradicting one of my theses in The Wretched of the Corporate State—he is inhabiting it.
At a later stage, I will extend the argument developed in The Wretched of the Corporate State. Taking Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as my model and epidermalization as the central analytic key, there I will show how the internet age has transformed private actors such as Bennett, Husband, and others like them into de facto enforcers of the corporate state and its regime of institutional white supremacy.
