David Theo Goldberg, director of the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute, executive director of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, and professor of comparative literature and anthropology at UCI, has a new book challenging the idea of the “post-racial.” Are We All Postracial Yet? (Polity Press, 2015) posits that post-raciality is simply another incarnation of racism.
Below, we ask Dr. Goldberg questions about his book and gain a better understanding of our current racial politics.
1. What does post-racial mean and is it problematic?
The discussion about the post-racial has largely been about whether the US is post-racial yet, having supposedly gotten over its history of racism. Conservatives insist that the society has; liberals and progressives that the US is far from over its racist legacy. The latter response seems obvious. The Black Lives Matter movement that got founded after the George Zimmerman acquittal for Trayvon Martin’s killing but which took off following Ferguson a year ago has helped to make this evident to anyone not already paying attention.
But I think the empirical question regarding whether we are or are not post-racial is not the compelling one. The more pressing question is what racial work the conception of the post-racial is doing. The post-racial is racism’s contemporary articulation. In that sense, the post-racial is to the history of race what the postcolonial is to the history of colonialism—its contemporary mode of articulation. Post-raciality, in short, is the new racism.
Post-raciality operates by insisting that the legacy of racial discrimination and disadvantage has been waning over time. If it exists now at all, such discrimination is deemed anomalous and individually expressed, not structural or socially fueled. Racist outbursts are considered occasional, not systemic or systematic, with diminishing impact. Proponents of post-raciality are concerned to scrub racial reference from social usage, erasing language by which racisms can be identified, analysed, and addressed. They insist racism is largely of the past, and so in the past. They accordingly deny their refusal to acknowledge contemporary racisms, and then when called on it deny the denial. They insist that racism is perpetrated more readily by its historical victims—usually blacks—now aimed at its historical perpetrators, namely whites. And they dehumanize those they want to dismiss by reviving old modes of racist animalization in renewed terms, resorting to characterizations of snakes, vermin, cockroaches, monkeys, baboons, and the like.
2. It seems on the one hand that many of us want to be beyond race as if any racial division is the mark of a primitive society. On the other hand, if we claim not to “see” race, we may be attempting to invalidate the experiences of cultural/racial groups and denying any systemic inequalities. Is there a happy medium?
Well, to “be beyond race” a society needs to have dealt thoroughly with both its historical legacy and contemporary structures that enable and perpetuate racism. Erasing race—as in the various state bans on the use of affirmative action for admissions or hiring by state funded institutions—simply makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to identify and track the ongoing racist injustices in hiring, housing, police treatment and brutalization (stop and frisk), etc. So it is not simply about invalidating a group’s experiences so much as being able to evidence and address ongoing injustices, the fact that young black folk face much greater violence, existential risk, incarceration, and death at the hands of the state and its representatives, and are subjected to unacceptable inequalities enabled by racial discrimination.
In addition, racism is not the hangover of some antique, “primitive” society. It has structured modern states, and continues to do so, to the advantage of some and the burden of others. Racism emerged in the making of modern states, giving rise to racial classification schemes. Racisms have produced races, not the inverse, as the great analyst of race, Stuart Hall, pointed out a good while ago. And they always have a relational structure: the disbenefits to some as a consequence of racial structuring enable unfair advantages to others as a consequence.
3. The title of your book seems to imply a bit of impatience on behalf of those who would like society to be post-racial. Why did you choose this type of phrasing?
There were a number of issues at work in choosing the title. Polity, the publisher, were initiating a new series with this book, called “Debating Race.” They wanted each book in the series to be driven by a prevailing question, expressed in the book’s title. I actually had Harvard sociologist, Nathan Glazer’s book from the late 1990s in mind, We Are All Multiculturalists Now in which he bemoans the end of the pursuit of assimilation in American society, giving way to what he sees as multiculturalism’s insistence on discrete and self-absorbed, almost independent cultures refusing to be engaged by a common project. So you are right to pick up on some of the irony in my title, it is purposeful.
There’s a deeper critical connection to Glazer’s book though. I am arguing in my book that post-raciality, in the sense I develop it in the book, has become the point of insistence of those asserting that multiculturalism is dead, a failed project (in the terms of British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel). The insistence on post-raciality as the antidote to multiculturalism is the assertion that our society should be done with racial reference, leaving structural racism unidentifiable and so impossible to recognize and address, let alone redress.
4. In a recent article in Salon, you write, “Immediately following Obama’s election in 2008, conservative African–American commentator John McWhorter insisted that ‘Racism is over … It is not a moral duty to keep it front and center.’ He added in 2010 that ‘Obama’s first year has shown us … that race does not matter in America in the way it used to.’” With 2016 being an election year and no potential candidates of color stepping into the mix—how do you believe racial politics will come into play?
As I said above, race structures modern states and polities. I have argued elsewhere that modern states become modern, they are drawn into the modern world system, in good part through taking on racial structuring, from social classification schemes to the assignment of social benefits and disadvantages on at least implicit racial grounds. The historical record of many societies indicate that where political candidates come from only one racial group, one racial class not to put too fine a point on it, those societies are the ones most deeply racially configured. Racial arrangement is sown into their very DNA. In a sense, the polity in question doesn’t generally care about its racial homogeneity, indeed, revels in it if even recognizing its existence. The invisibility becomes all too revealing.
That said, there are three “candidates of color,” all on the Republican side (Carson, Cruz, and Rubio). That all three seem to represent the sort of politics I am identifying with post-raciality, with the very position McWhorter so counter-evidentially continues to insist upon—suggests that the Republicans would like to advance post-raciality, at least implicitly, as its structuring platform. In any case, the ongoing concerns over voting rights and police killings of black Americans suggest that racial politics will continue to haunt the American political landscape.
But there is more to be said here. The more explicit controversy around “Black Lives Matter” that continues to swirl through the political field suggests that large racial issues are going to continue to tug at the political conscience of America, no matter the denials and refusals that remain so rampant. Black Lives Matter is fast becoming the driving social movement of our time, and the difficulty most mainstream politicians are having in understanding the issues it represents and the energy it is mobilizing suggests that the mainstream political field has been caught completely unawares about how deep the frustration and anger run around extended racial denial. This too could be put down to the too quick recourse for the post-racial with which most mainstream politicians have been comfortable.
5. Is the post-racial a uniquely American concoction?
As I was suggesting in referencing Cameron and Merkel, the post-racial has a much wider global reach. The language of post-raciality may be less readily used but the issues it represents resonate today across many societies around the world, from Britain and Europe to South Africa, Latin America to Australia and indeed Israel/Palestine. Part of it is that on racial matters others too readily look to the US both to suggest they are different but also for guidance regarding the analytical language du jour by which to understand and represent contemporary racialities. Whether or not the language of the post-racial is explicitly invoked, the racial structures of contemporary social arrangement have wide application globally. As phenomenon, alas, post-raciality represents the prevailing racial structure of contemporary society. We are, all too readily and wrongly, post-racial today.
For a high-res version of the cover of Are We Postracial Yet?, please click here.
Dr. Goldberg is formerly director and professor of the School of Justice Studies, a law and social science program, at Arizona State University. In addition to Are We All Post-Racial Yet? (Polity, 2015), he is the author of Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993), Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (1997), Ethical Theory and Social Issues (1990/1995), The Racial State (2002), The Threat of Race (2009), and co-author of The Future of Thinking (2010). He edited Anatomy of Racism (1990), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1995), and co-edited Race Critical Theories (2005), Rethinking Postcolonialism (2002), Companion on Gender Studies (2002) and Companion on Race and Ethnic Studies (2005). He was the founding co-editor of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.
