American racism shifted from constitutionalized segregation to privatized preference-driven apartness

Evidence

Historically, standard American racism at the opening of the twentieth century took the cruel form, then, of a constitutionalized segregation (accompanied by the cultivating ethnocide of assimilating those remaining among American Indians). Contemporary racial americanization, by extension, has informalized apartness, rendering it the effect of privatized preference schemes rather than explicitly institutionalized legalities. Increasingly today, members of different ethnoracially constituted groups – whites, blacks, Latinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indian, and Arab Americans – have come “by choice” (principally but not only the choices of whites) to occupy discrete urban spaces. These were at first different neighborhoods but today more often than not are different municipalities, different cities. The choices have been shaped by policy and law to order social opportunities for some while closing them down for others, streaming access in the former case while plugging it up in the latter. This reveals how preferences are molded even as that discriminate sculpting is obviated, rendered obscure and indiscernible in the name of its claimed obsolescence. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates the book’s core racial-neoliberalism thesis — privatization of race governance maps onto the broader turn away from state-level discrimination. — connects to: Race and segregation preoccupied American audiences even in economic policy contexts — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 550; Outlawing explicit race measures resegregates schools through residential sorting — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 394; Racial ordering persists by relocating from public law to private spheres — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1845 (+8 more)
• SEED: Angle: how self-segregation into separate municipalities functions as a privatized substitute for Jim Crow — ‘choice’ as the modern cover for racial ordering.