Are We All Postracial Yet? E-Book

David Theo Goldberg

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Debating Race
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 206

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

We hear much talk about the advent of a “postracial” age. The election of Barack Obama as President of the U.S. was held by many to be proof that we have once and for all moved beyond race. The Swedish government has even gone so far as to erase all references to race from its legislative documents.

However, as Ferguson, MO, and countless social statistics show, beneath such claims lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday, institutional, and structural racisms persist and renew themselves beneath the polish of nonraciality. A conundrum lies at its very heart as seen when the election of a Black President was taken to be the pinnacle of postraciality.
 
In this sparkling essay, David Theo Goldberg seeks to explain this conundrum, and reveals how the postracial is merely the afterlife of race, not its demise. Postraciality is the new logic of raciality.

Leseprobe

Epigraph

“Goldberg's Are we all postracial yet? provocatively and powerfully interrogates the idea of the postracial as something more than an aspiration, but in fact the basis for a new phase of racial arrangements, shaped by shifts in the political economy, domestic and international law, and geopolitics. The work is theoretically rich and probing with both global and local implications. It deepens race critical theory, and furthers our understanding of the ongoing significance of race.”

Imani Perry Hughes, Princeton University

“This book reveals the neo-raciality masked by the claims of the postracial. The underlying structures of economic, political, and social inequalities have seen the afterlife of racism in police uniforms walk the streets of America openly amidst the cries of ‘I can't breathe’ from its victims. A must read.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, University of California, Irvine

“Are we all postracial yet? David Theo Goldberg, in answering this question with a resounding ‘yes,’ explores the postracial as a logic and condition that enables racism to persist and proliferate. This book offers a sharp, wise, and unflinching critique of the racism of the postracial. It is also a deeply optimistic book: there is no better way of demanding an alternative than by demonstrating its necessity.”

Sara Ahmed, Goldsmiths

“David Theo Goldberg's trenchant meditation on the challenges to anti-racist remediation reveals a structured cultural silence about deep social shape-shifting forms of inequality. The very term ‘post­racial’ places racism's harms beyond critical analysis, rendered unreachable because located in the past, indecipherable because erased from language, and ungovernable because assigned to private rather than collective address. This excellent study explores the limits of ‘postracialism’ in an epoch of denial, unsparingly dissecting the common attributes of intersecting forms of prejudice.”

Patricia Williams, Columbia Law School

“This pointed, thoughtful, and readable book is a bold intervention in the politics of undoing racial hierarchy. For too long, anti-racism has been inhibited by the difficulties involved in moving beyond critique. David Theo Goldberg has risen to the cosmopolitan challenge involved in breaking that logjam. With characteristic rigor and wit, he shows how anti-racist politics can be reconfigured in combative, practical, and affirmative forms.”

Paul Gilroy, King's College London

Copyright page

Copyright © David Theo Goldberg 2015

The right of David Theo Goldberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8971-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8972-2 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldberg, David Theo.

    Are we all postracial yet? / David Theo Goldberg.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-8971-5 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-8972-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)    1.  Racism.    2.  Race relations.    3.  Anti-racism.    4.  Multiculturalism.    I.  Title.

    HT1521.G547 2015

    305.8–dc23

         2015004085

Typeset in 11 on 15 pt Adobe Garamond

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

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Dedication

for the folks on the bus

Preface

I have been thinking about the postracial explicitly for some years now, at least since Barack Obama was first elected in November 2008. At the same time, my thinking about the racial, and the postracial in particular, has always exceeded any single nation-state experience. Any account of the anti-racial and the anti-racist today is also always about the postracial, if not explicitly named as such. My concern, it will quickly be seen, is not with how exasperatingly far we are from postraciality, conventionally understood, even in the face of its insistence. Rather, it is to make sense of how racisms can proliferate, can be so crudely persistent and obvious, in the face of their equally insistent claims to be over, socially irrelevant, no longer of real concern. This is the knot I shall address in this little book. I will be at pains to describe in some detail the threads constituting the knot, how they came to emerge historically, their socio-logics and force, their renewed subjects of expression and targets. I will suggest in conclusion ways of thinking about their critical address. The driving question is how racist expression can thrive at the very moment that racial configuration is claimed to be a thing of the past.