David Theo Goldberg - Are We All Postracial Yet? (Debating Race)

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.

Ngg 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 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

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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

305.8dc23

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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for the folks on the bus

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.

Although I have been thinking for a good while about these issues, the book itself was written very quickly. I was approached by Polity late in 2013 to consider writing a short book on the subject for the new series Debating Race. By the time things had been worked out, March had rolled by and the book's delivery date was six months away. I was in the midst of co-organizing what would come to be a remarkable event in July 2014. The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), which I direct, has been convening two-week summer institutes in different global sites, the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, for a decade now. The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) has been running a comparable workshop each July since 2009, with which I have also been engaged since its inception. We happily combined our resources to run a mobile workshop for two weeks across South Africa, fortuitously for the writing of this book, on the archives of the nonracial. I sat down to write the manuscript on the flight home from South Africa in mid-July. For better and worse, three intensive months later I delivered the manuscript. Sometimes the gods of intellectual production oblige.

The South African workshop was designed to engage key historical sites of anti-apartheid struggle across South Africa in addressing theoretical and global issues of race, racism, and the nonracial. The undertaking was to drive almost sixty intellectuals, artists, and activists from across the world around South Africa for two weeks to engage with each other as well as with local interlocutors at each of our stopping points in the interests of animating a sustained project of thinking (about) the nonracial. We started in Johannesburg, wound our way up to Mbabane in Swaziland, site of a significant anti-apartheid exile gathering, then drove down to Durban, on to Qunu, Transkei, overlooking Nelson Mandela's birth and resting places, and then to the Biko Centre for Black Consciousness in Ginsburg, King William's Town. We ended our remarkable journey in Cape Town. It was co-organized with my dear friends and colleagues Achille Mbembe, Kelly Gillespie, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, Zen Marie, Julia Hornberger, and Annie (Dhammamega) Leatt. The thinking of this book is deeply marked by this extraordinary experience and set of intensely generative engagements. No one on the bus was left unmarked by the interaction. I should stress, though, that no one but me is accountable for any assertion or argument appearing in these pages.