President Obama’s national security speech at the National Archives has, by this point, been both lauded for its oratory and pragmatism, and heavily critiqued for its supposed doctrinal continuations with the Bush administration. Though Obama deserves credit for so forthrightly engaging the issue, with so much at stake (to paraphrase both the President and, ironically, Dick Cheney), I find the critical approach more urgent in examining the problematic aspects here—foremost among them, the belief in the ideological integrity of a policy of “preventive detention.”

Of course, I’m not the first person to engage this problem, but I am troubled by the way that it has been framed: a majority seem to articulate their angst around a supposed collapse or violation of American ideals (see, for example, Thursday’s Institute for Public Accuracy release; or the New York Times article by William Glaberson), when the more wrenching issue here is the idea that the very humanity of these people has been rendered, in a word, revocable. Against the obvious evidence of infringements of human liberty, the brash display of collective narcissism here is startling: like gazing over someone else’s shoulder in a mirror, the popular discourse on this issue looks past the heartbreaking violations of human rights, to instead focus on how it either conflicts with our values or endangers our security.

Of course, the imprisonment of hundreds of Muslims—most often “terrorists” in only the hypothetical sense, held under a guise of criminality yet to come—indeterminately and without charge is, to be sure, antithetical to what we as Americans suppose to be our foundational morality. Yet the reduction of humanity that the stripping of their rights entails is, in practice if not in theory, certainly not without precedent, and it is worth considering the racist underpinnings that both mark this instance and have characterized most of the mass-incarceration movements of the United States, dating back far into the nineteenth century.

From the outset, the westward expansion of the infant nation-state occurred at the profound and brutal expense of Native Americans, who were offered an impossible choice between death and relocation. Socially defined as atavistic impediments to the natural, expansionist progress of the “civilized” nation-state, native peoples were subhumanized and devalued; thus the theft of their land and lives and their ultimate confinement to reservations was rationalized as a necessary, if unfortunate, product of national progress. Their imprisonment, the argument of the white majority went (and goes), was thus justified, for it opened the West for settlement and removed the racialized specter of a threat to white America.

The World War II era witnessed a similar, and even more explicitly racist, national security incarceration project: the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Idiomatically placing Japanese-Americans outside the pale of a “loyal” American citizenry, it is telling that the federal government—and, through hegemonic influence, the American people—were willing to explicitly single out that particular group for incarceration, despite the fact that Americans of Germanic descent never experienced anything comparable. Though certainly an uncomfortable notion, the fact remains that the American public appeared overwhelmingly more forgiving to an enemy imbued with whiteness than to one of color.

To bring this forward into the modern context, today American prisons embody what scholar Nikhil Singh has called the “preeminent U.S. racial space.” The black/white disparities in contemporary prison populations are well-documented, perhaps the most striking figure being that blacks comprise approximately 12 percent of the overall population, but nearly half of the prison one; similarly, studies show that when comparable crimes are committed by blacks and whites, the punishment is far more heavy-handed for African-Americans. Combined with the withholding of civil-democratic rights that a felony conviction entails, the black overrepresentation within the prison population renders prisons as distinct sites of “black anti-citizenship.” A racialized “other,” once again, is stripped of rights and locked away in the name of safety and security.

Leonard Peltier once wrote that innocence is the weakest defense, because it is articulated as a singular plea against the “thousand voices” of guilt. The disparities of that equation in the modern context are stretched to their grossest extreme as we return our gaze to the plight of those inmates now at Guantanamo (and soon, it appears to be relocated): the pleas of innocence of a few hundred are readily drowned out by a chorus of millions who all too quickly assign their guilt. It is important, also, to recognize that a hypothetical crime—which is, by definition, the only type of crime that the presidential doctrine of “preventive detention” can combat—is not, under any conscionable legal system, a punishable event. People can invoke “national security” until they bleed the colors of the flag, but it would perhaps do them well to pause for a moment to think of the extraordinarily racist hinge on which this particular national security discourse swings — evidenced, for example, by influential anthropological studies claiming to excavate a monolithic “Arab mind” (see Raphael Patai’s work of that name). It is profoundly disturbing that even military commanders on the ground in Iraq differentiate and racialize the humanity of Arab peoples; as Captain Todd Brown commented, “You’ve got to understand the Arab mind; the only thing they understand is force.” (For a broader study of this, see Nikhil Singh’s article “The Afterlife of Fascism.”)

Additionally, those who decry the continuation of Guantanamo or the idea of continued imprisonment for the prisoners there need to reconsider their appeals to American morality—the crime here is against humanity, not a set of American ethics that has proved unstable at best in its application to non-white persons. Furthermore, we must understand the historical continuity of these violations: the idea of racist imprisonment and internment does not begin (nor, without a dramatic discursive and ideological shift, will it end) here; rather, it arcs back to the infancy of the nation. And so perhaps it is there that the greatest opportunity awaits President Obama, if only he will reach out and take it: the possibility of breaking the incessant, repeated revocations of true humanity that have characterized broader America’s interactions with both its internal minorities and the international for far too long.