Anti-racist law itself perpetuates the race vocabulary it seeks to abolish.

Evidence

The institution of democratic government in South Africa in 1994 brought an aspiration for a “nonracial” society, but group differences persist, there and elsewhere, and so long as it is necessary to use words like race and racial in the prohibition of incitement to hatred and in penalizing racial discrimination, it will not be possible to eliminate all use of the idiom of race in either law or popular speech. Can other words be employed to get round the difficulties that derive from the dubious status of the race concept? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 679

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the paradox that eliminating racial vocabulary is impossible while racial discrimination remains legally actionable.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradoxical insight — the legal toolkit for dismantling racism is the same instrument that keeps the concept alive in public discourse.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Why the word race won’t die — the legal rope-and-ladder paradox of anti-racist law.’
• XREF: connects to: Australian anti-discrimination law treats race as a social construct shaped partly by others’ perceptions. — Mareike Riedel, Islamophobia, Racial Discrimination…, 51; Anti-sharia legislation itself performed the reduction of religion to race — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 280