Exodus

"This is what I mean:“race,” on the one hand, speaks through multiple discourses that inhabit intersecting axes of relations that banish once and for all the illusion of a split between “public” and “private.” The individual in the collective traversed by “race” – and there are no known exceptions, as far as I can tell – is covered by it before language and its differential laws take hold. […] What is this thing called “race”? Our deadliest abstraction? Our most nonmaterial actuality? Not fact, but our deadliest fiction that gives the lie to doubt about ghosts? In a word, “race” haunts the air where women and men in social organization are most reasonable."

(Hortense Spillers, 1996)