Jonathan Perr

Professor Thurtle

CHID 222 AD

24 October 2016

The Intersectionality of Biopower and Racism

French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault first formulated his conception of

biopower in his lectures at the Collège de France. He espoused the idea that the nineteenth

century gave birth to a breed of power different than either disciplinary or sovereign power.

Foucault’s theory of biopower suggests that knowledge-based power possessed by a governing

body controls and normalizes populations allowing such populations to reach some favorable

equilibrium. The exercising of biopower to achieve this homeostasis appears in a wide array of

aspects of contemporary life: hygiene, weaponry, and most notably, racism (Foucault 251).

Governments and populations employ racism to not merely suppress a particular category of the

population but to consequently improve the quality of life of the oppressors by letting or making

the oppressed perish.

The discovery of the HeLa cell line marked both a great stride in western medical therapy

and a blatant example of the connection between racism and biopower. February 8, 1951, an

African-American woman, Henrietta Lacks, had cells removed from her cancerous cervix. These

cells provided the foundation for the HeLa cell line which researchers commonly use today to

develop cancer treatments (Watson). Sadly, Lacks never consented to the harvesting of her

cervical cells and was buried in an unknown location with no tombstone (Watson). This flagrant

disrespect results from the abhorrent racism of the Jim Crow era, and the objectification of Lacks

through racism created a research tool to ameliorate the ailments of the dominant race that
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possesses access to the results—whites. Thus, Johns Hopkins Hospital wielded biopower to

augment the quality of life of whites—making live—and let Henrietta Lacks die.

The biopower that dominant races hold over those that represent minorities allows the

dominant race to engage in predatory behavior, taking life to sustain its own. Foucault states in

relation to the exercising of killing by means of biopower, “…the imperative to kill is acceptable

only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological

threat to and the improvement to the species or race” (Foucault 256). Analogously, Johns

Hopkins Hospital assumed the right to use and dispose of Henrietta Lacks, a black patient, as one

would dispose of a mouse in a lab through the justification that the product conceived from her

tissue would benefit the commanding race by eliminating biological threats. Hence, the racism in

and fruitful result of Lacks’s treatment represents a microcosm of a majority race utilizing

minority life to perpetuate and improve its own existence. Such socially aggressive behavior

spurs systematic racism and the objectification of minority ethnic groups that transcends the

research sector.

Ultimately, in the age of biopower, the dominant race wields the power to treat

populations of minority races as resources for the advancement of that commanding race, and the

creation of the HeLa cell line and the treatment of Henrietta Lacks symbolizes the inequity that

enables one governing race to exploit another less powerful population. This dark relationship

between predatory racism and the success of the commanding race only cements and expands

contemporary society’s racism. The ability to utilize biopower to influence populations and deem

one population inferior creates a form of racial war that eclipses a simple cultural battle. This

biopower-born neo-racism creates a biologically preferable situation in which the wielder

perpetuates and improves its existence while the target of that racism withers.
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Works Cited

Foucault, Michel, Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald, and David Macey.

Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76. New York:

Picador, 2003. Print.

Watson, Denise. "Cancer Cells Killed Henrietta Lacks - Then Made Her Immortal." The

Virginian Pilot. N.p., 2015. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.