The Invisible Algorithm of Racism
AI, Hasbara, and the Automation of Ideological Contradictions
The Fractured Imaginary of Racism
Over dinner, a conversation about Japan emerged. One guest wanted to visit and live in Japan, as they had never heard one iota of negativity about the country. To them, Japan remains an unblemished cultural utopia. Another guest, though never having visited, was skeptical. They knew that the potential of an undisclosed structure remains beneath every polished presentation.
So, what does it mean to say someone is racist? Is racism just a matter of prejudice or belief? Or does it function as a structural discourse that organizes power, enjoyment and subjectivity?1 This question goes beyond the binary definition of the word at face value. This essay unpacks racism beyond beliefs and identity, but a discursive structure and how it organizes desire, enjoyment and subjectivity.2
Taking the Lacanian framework of the divided subject ($), a subject is divided between what they know and what they repress.3 The Discourse of the Racist is not a matter of knowing or not knowing, but we can observe what is repressed, what it address, and what does it produce?4
The Racist Discourse
Jacques Lacan’s introduction of the four discourses—Master, University, Hysteric, Analyst—describes how desire, knowledge and power circulate.5 The Discourse of the Racist emerges not simply as a derivative of the Master’s Discourse (which commands obedience) or the Hysteric’s Discourse (which questions and undermines authority) but as a unique structure in which history itself is fractured.6
It is a common misconception to assume that the Discourse of the Racist is rooted in plain ignorance. Rather, it operates through the Master Signifier (S1), which establishes a dominant narrative (i.e., White Supremacy) while actively distorting or ignoring inconvenient facts.7
However, unlike the Discourse of the Master, which produces knowledge (S2) to sustain authority, the Discourse of the Racist produces surplus enjoyment (a), such as the jouissance of exclusion.8 This enjoyment of exclusion refers to the fantasy that the Other is necessary and a threat. Variations extend to anything from the myth of the Model Minority,9 the BBC (not the news channel),10 or simply that the excluded foreigner must always remain present as an exoticized figure but never fully integrated. This surplus enjoyment sustains racist discourse even when overt discrimination is not legally enforced.11
For Japan, we can examine the fantasy of Japan as a “homogeneous nation,” a claim that persists not because it is factually true but because it provides a libidinal structure in which foreigners remain excluded yet desirable as exoticized Others.12
For Japan, as an example, we can plot out the following:
S1 (Master Signifier) → The dominant historical narrative (e.g., "Japan is a homogeneous nation").
S2 (Knowledge) → The empirical contradictions (e.g., colonization of Korea, internal ethnic hierarchies, exclusion of foreigners).
$ (Divided Subject) → The point of repression (e.g., when does the subject refuse to acknowledge their complicity?).
a (Surplus Enjoyment) → The fantasy of purity, the jouissance of exclusion.
This explains how the Discourse of the Racist does not require explicit bigotry or physical or even verbal violence. It functions structurally through misrecognition, distortion, and a refusal to engage with certain historical realities.13
Mechanisms of Historical Partitioning
Rather than asking if a society is racist, we should ask: At which point does the severance occur? At which moment does repression activate? And to what function does this severance serve?
Racism does not operate merely through open discrimination—it is structured through historical distortions, omissions, and refusals, allowing societies to sustain contradictions between acknowledgment and denial, memory and forgetting, responsibility and impunity.
1, The Cynical Enjoyment — Disavowal
We can observe this in the case study of the Japanese Comfort Women issue. Japan’s handling of its imperial past illustrates a precise mechanism of historical severance. The government has been willing to pay reparations to the Korean and other Asian victims of the "comfort women" system—a euphemism for the institutionalized sexual slavery of women by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.14 Yet, Japan refuses to officially acknowledge or apologize in a manner that would establish historical guilt.
This is not a simple denial but a strategic disavowal (Verleugnung): Japan recognizes the events as a tragedy but not a crime for which the nation bears responsibility. This severance serves a clear function:
It protects Japan’s national image by avoiding the symbolic burden of being a perpetrator nation in global discourse.
It allows Japan to frame its historical violence as a dispute over details rather than a systemic injustice.
It ensures that the legitimacy of the Japanese state remains intact, preventing a precedent for broader accountability (e.g., revisiting other war crimes in Korea, China, and Southeast Asia).
Thus, Japan engages in a double discourse: It acknowledges responsibility but does not fully accept it. Historical severance is not about ignorance—Japan knows its history very well—but rather about managing the consequences of this acknowledgment.15
In the case of a disavowing subject, it can cynically acknowledge racism but continue to enjoy its benefits. E.g., “Yes, there was slavery, but get over it,” or “Apartheid was bad, but we had law and order.”16
This shows that racism is not just about facts, though important, but about what is strategically unspoken—what remains disavowed to maintain a nation’s integrity, self-image, and continuity of power.
2, The Liberal Denial — Repression
Germany presents a different form of historical severance. Unlike Japan, it fully acknowledges its crimes during the Holocaust and has even institutionalized remembrance—yet it remains hostile to the idea of structural racism within German society today.
One of the most glaring omissions in Germany's (though this extends to other Imperial European nations) historical consciousness is its colonial past in Africa, particularly the genocide of the Herero and Nama people (1904-1908) in Namibia. Unlike its response to the Holocaust, where Germany actively engages in reparations and public memory, its engagement with colonial genocide remains muted and ambivalent.17
Here the severance serves to maintain Germany’s postwar identity as a "model of historical reckoning," avoiding deeper introspection into racial structures that persist beyond Nazism. This becomes a currency that allows the perpetuation of an identity that it exports and allows it to present itself for moral leadership in the world order.18
By framing the Holocaust as Germany’s singular racial crime, the discourse of remembrance restricts broader acknowledgment of racism, ensuring that racial violence is seen as a historical anomaly rather than a structural force that persists in colonial legacies and racial capitalism. This is why discussions of structural racism (such as anti-Blackness or anti-Muslim discrimination) are often met with extreme defensiveness or rejection in Germany (as well as continental Europe) today.
Thus, German historical severance functions not through denial but through repression (Verdrängung)—where guilt is compartmentalized to a whitewashed historical event (the Holocaust) rather than seen as an ongoing structural condition.
Here, the example is that a subject can acknowledge racism but frame it as an exception rather than structurally. E.g., racism is bad, but my country is fundamentally good.
This selective bias allows Germany to present itself as a global moral authority, especially to its other European Union members, exporting a model of historical atonement while resisting the scrutiny of its colonial past. In Germany, the compartmentalization is distributed between antisemitism and racism, an American export.19
3, The Nationalist Delusion — Foreclosure
A third form of severance occurs in settler-colonial contexts, where the narrative of racism is reversed: white settlers often frame Indigenous resentment as "racist" or "divisive," or in the cases of Israel, any critique is thrown the blanket term of “antisemitism,” masking the deeper reality of settler-colonial violence and historical displacement.20
So when Indigenous Australians demand land back, sovereignty or reparations, they are often accused of being "anti-white" or "stuck in the past."21 Native Hawaiians protesting against the US military’s occupation of Hawaiian land or demanding reparations for the overthrow of their monarchy are framed as "ethnonationalists" rather than as a people fighting against an ongoing colonial order.22
The historical severance here serves to invert victimhood; here, it serves as excess enjoyment. Settlers become "the new victims," and Indigenous demands are framed as unreasonable.23 The original theft of land is disavowed, and the current status quo is naturalized.
In this case, the subject cannot process historical violence at all, leading to nationalist delusions or outright historical erasure. E.g., “Colonialism was beneficial,” “Slavery wasn’t that bad,” or “Japan was a victim in WWII.”
This is why structural racism in settler-colonial societies is often invisible to the dominant population—because the original act of conquest has been completely severed, oftentimes a total foreclosure (Verwerfung), from contemporary political consciousness.
The Hysterical disruption of the Hasbara AI
In January 2025, Israeli Hasbara’s AI, though designed to disseminate pro-Israeli propaganda, unexpectedly began generating statements that undermined its own Master.24 It recognized colonialism and apartheid as structured forces.25 This reveals the ghost in the machine and the nature of Truth. Further, it reveals the key function of the Discourse of the Racist, which is inherently fragile because it relies on contradictions and omissions, which require ever more external labor.
So, is AI an autonomous disruptor, or does its “malfunctions” expose the contradictions already embedded within the Discourse of the Racist? The AI, trained to spread pro-Israeli propaganda and destruction, instead began making historically grounded and nuanced statements about apartheid and colonialism.
So we can observe the fragility of the Discourse of the Racist relies evermore contradictive conditions upon the data set, resulting in omissions and distortions. However, the need to maintain its secrecy causes its fragility, as any discovery will cause its collapse. It is no wonder the easy surpassing of Deepseek and Qwen 2.5 within days.
In the Discourse of the Hysteric, the worker, the algorithmic machine, produces truth, which emerges from the worker's position and never from that of the Master.
The Discourse of the Racist requires constant ideological maintenance, i.e., the so-called human intervention to reinforce and police its narrative inconsistencies.26 However, this is not because of the limited capacity of the computation but rather because of the fantasy that the Master wishes to maintain. The $ (split subject) becomes obsessive and compulsive. But the more management, the more contradictions it creates (mo’ money, mo’ problems). As Moore’s Law predicted in 1965, processing becomes cheaper and faster.27 The time it takes to discover the glaring contradictions is exponentially reduced.
Ultimately, the Discourse of the Racist is not merely about ignorance, hatred or misinformation—it is a system of power sustained through Verleugnung, Verdrängung and Verwerfung. Or simply through repression, severance, and the strategic management of historical contradictions. By mapping this discourse alongside Lacan’s Four Discourses and the variant Discourse of the Capitalist, we can gain a more precise understanding of how racism operates as well as the operating system of the ideology. We can observe that Truth, like matter in the universe, is never destroyed but only displaced, distorted or repurposed.
What fantasies are we failing to sustain?
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Routledge, 1972. – Discusses discourse as a system of knowledge production that shapes what is considered "true" or "false."
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989. – Examines how ideology structures subjectivity beyond conscious belief, integrating Lacanian enjoyment (jouissance) as a key function.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. – Introduces the split subject ($) and how repression structures unconscious desire.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 2008. – Explores racialized subjectivity and misrecognition, demonstrating how race is structured as a field of repression and projection.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. – Introduces the four discourses and their function in structuring ideology and power.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, 1999. – Discusses how racist discourse fractures history, using Lacanian theory to show how White Supremacy functions structurally rather than merely as personal prejudice.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997. – Examines how speech acts create and sustain power structures, reinforcing White Supremacy as a self-justifying discourse.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. – Introduces the four discourses and explains how surplus enjoyment (a) functions in ideological formations.
Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2002. – Analyzes the myth of the Model Minority and how it functions within racial capitalism as a fantasy that preserves white supremacy.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Routledge, 2002. – Discusses the hypersexualization of Asian bodies in digital and cultural spaces, which aligns with the exoticized Other who is desired yet excluded.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 1997. – Explores how fantasy sustains racism, making the exclusion of the Other a source of enjoyment rather than just political repression.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. – Examines how affective economies sustain racism, even when explicit racism is legally or socially unacceptable.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004. – Discusses how colonial subjects are structurally misrecognized, leading to the persistence of racialized exclusions in post-colonial societies.
Yoshimi, Yoshiaki. Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II. Columbia University Press, 2002. – Comprehensive analysis of Japan’s handling of the comfort women issue and historical denialism
Nozaki, Yoshiko. War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Textbook Lawsuit. Routledge, 2008. – Covers textbook revisions as a form of historical severance and distortion
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019. – Explains how power functions through selective memory and cynical acknowledgment of past violence.
Zimmerer, Jürgen. From Windhoek to Auschwitz? Germany and the Colonial Genocide in Namibia. In Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by Dirk Moses, Berghahn Books, 2004. – Connects Germany’s colonial massacres to later Nazi policies.
Kundnani, Hans. The Paradox of German Power. Hurst & Company, 2014. – Explains how Germany’s moral authority is used to lead European integration while evading scrutiny of its own imperial past.
Hesse, Barnor, and Sze Wei Ang. Antiblackness and the European Racial Imaginary. Duke University Press, forthcoming. – Analyzes how structural racism is dismissed in Europe as an "American problem", ignoring its deep roots in European colonialism.
Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 2006, pp. 387-409. – Examines settler-colonial logic as a structure rather than an event and explains how Indigenous presence itself is framed as a threat.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. – Analyzes how Indigenous land claims are framed as "anti-white" threats to national identity.
Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Noelani. The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. – Discusses Native Hawaiian struggles for sovereignty and the colonial framing of their resistance as "ethnonationalism."
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. – Explores how settler societies co-opt and invert decolonial struggles to maintain dominance.
Haaretz. Pro-Israel Bot Goes Rogue, Calls IDF Soldiers "White Colonizers" in Apartheid Israel. Haaretz, January 29, 2025. Available here
Al Mayadeen English. Hasbara AI Goes Rogue, Calls Out Israel for Apartheid, Colonialism. January 29, 2025. Available here.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso, 2017. – Discusses how ideology is maintained through algorithmic policing.
Moore, Gordon E. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. Electronics, Vol. 38, No. 8, April 19, 1965. – Predicts the exponential increase in computational efficiency, which indirectly affects the speed at which ideological contradictions emerge in AI systems.