Goldwater’s left hand: Post-raciality and the roots of the post-racial racist state

Abstract

Post-racial discourse rests on the allegation of a particular undoing to which we must urgently attend. There is almost nothing empirically credible about this pseudo-historical narrative structure, yet as a (growing) field of knowledge production, the post-racial discursive regime is no less formidable and far-ranging. Perhaps most importantly, it has attempted to reconstitute (and has undeniably already altered) some of the operative truth assumptions of racial discourse writ large: as a teleological marking, post-racialism minimally posits that the long modern era’s reliance on various iterations of racial power/violence—from modalities of human classification to strategies of mass geographic containment and social liquidation—has yielded to other forms of social ordering, which are no longer centrally premised on this particular form of human differentiation and brutal hierarchy.

The Globality of Whiteness in Post-Racial Visual Culture

“…The postracial names the condition within which racism's structural violence operates flexibly both within and beyond the logic of the colour line, while routinely disavowing its properly racial character (Rodríguez 2014). Even as political subjects draw on the figure of the 'post-racial' to bracket a substantive reckoning with the racialized rationale for the 'nongeneralizability of human value' (Melamed 2011, p. 47), the post-racial maintains its coherence through hegemonic investments in individual difference as a morally righteous economy of self-fashioning.…”

Boundaries and barriers: Racialized dynamics of political power

“…Elite (and non‐elite by proxy) social actors then protect this feature of the state's structure (its function) by circulating discourses that obscure or rationalize both the racial nature of this process and its consequences (Goldberg, ; Garner, ). Dylan Rodríguez () thus argues that the contemporary state is, paradoxically, a “post‐racial racist state” that simultaneously facilitates the discursive and logical concealment and practical enactment of racial oppression.…”