Abolishing official race language can mask persisting racialized structural inequalities as class inequalities.

Evidence

Post-apartheid South Africa, then, has come to exemplify neoliberal racial articulation. It has transformed racial apartheid into a more generic and so supposedly less pernicious class apartheid. Presumptively less pernicious because more like the class apartheid racial neoliberalism has unleashed in cases like racial americanization and latinamericanization, in the US and Brazil especially. Its racial arrangements are thus seen to fall within the parameters of what has come to be considered the global normal and so acceptable. But acceptable because the terms of recognition now exclude the analytics of racial articulation, because the state no longer takes itself so ordered even if the structural informalities of the society continue to embed their legacy. With the secularization of race, the language of racial order disappears even if its outlines and impressions, its structural imprint, its threats continue to have social force. Much like a shroud in its ghostly appearance, race still exercises a magnetism, modes of referentiality and divisive effects, if now more informalized and sublimated into the body politic, just as it is shrugged off. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1603

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader framework of racial neoliberalism from this same book and to the concept of race becoming sublimated rather than disappearing. — connects to: Formal colorblindness preserves racial inequality in privatized, unnamed form. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 129; Post-Cold-War racism showed class analysis alone cannot explain structural inequality — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1357
• DEEPTHINKING: The shroud metaphor and the argument that secularizing race makes its language vanish while its structural force persists is a dense, paradigm-level claim about how liberal states launder racial hierarchy.