"But for Foucault, modern racism, this state form of racism is any alleged biological incision or division in the biological continuity of the human species that indicates who in that former or alleged continuity is to live and who is to die. It may capture some form of “ethnic racism,” as he terms it, but since it concerns techniques that break the biological continuum most generally, it cannot uniquely and completely describe any of its supposed instances, let alone ethnic racism, were we to grant it a place in that category. The biological relation is a relation of the logic of life in which the death of the other allegedly secures one’s life. On Foucault’s construal of the modern notion of life, if something is a biological threat, then it can become the object of power in the modern age, the object of bio-power. That is, the living continuity, or the continuum of life, by being threatened with interruption, allegedly destines to death any threats to it. But life includes lives destined to die; all lives are mortal. So, state murder is of course a matter of deliberately hastening the death of human beings. Whatever else modern racism is for Foucault, it is certainly a specifically scientific death sentence. One of the most important claims in this account is that the allegedly scientific or medical grounds offered by states for their acts of killing are covers or alibis for starkly and purely political actions. His point is that the political no longer presents itself as such, in terms of purely political aims, enmities and alliances, but is vested in the supposedly reasonable wear of scientific and medical discourse''.

Mader