Anti-racist politics that centers race tends to reinscribe the very exclusions it opposes

Evidence

Racial invocation by the state and definition of the state by race, it tended to be ambivalent and ambiguous. In invoking the very terms follows, almost invariably restricts the range of critical intervention and transformative potential to a dualistic and mutually exclusionary choice. On one hand, it elevates the narrowing naturalization of the assimilationist or integrationist; on the other, it begrudgingly spawns of subjugation, in “standing inside them” (Goldberg 1993) to transformative purposes, racial invocation likely reinscribes elements of the very presumptions promoting racist exclusions it is committed to ending. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 64

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘anti-racist racism’ paradox Davis and Essed raise, echoing the general critique of identity-based politics that essentializes group categories. — connects to: Successful anti-racist movements trigger renewed, subtler forms of racial exclusion, not elimination — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1915

Related

• Racial discourse actively produces exclusion, not just retroactive justification (similarity 0.83)
• Race and racism must be distinguished analytically and politically (similarity 0.82)
• A racially conceived state can only express itself in racial terms (similarity 0.82)
• Antiracist movements sought to transform racial status quo (similarity 0.82)
• The racial state is normal, not exceptional, to modernity (similarity 0.81)
• Scholarship has largely ignored the state’s role in reproducing racism (similarity 0.81)
• Even conceptually abstract race is never far from racism’s violence (similarity 0.81)
• Racial states are conditions of being as well as governance structures. (similarity 0.81)
• Successful anti-racist movements trigger renewed, subtler forms of racial exclusion, not elimination (similarity 0.81)
• Opposing racial classification can substitute for and crowd out the struggle against racism (similarity 0.81)
• The term racialization smuggles in an unargued critical judgment behind neutral description. (similarity 0.81)
• Racial inclusivity and exclusivity are mutually constitutive in modern states (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-racism is a refusal of race’s theologically mediated law (similarity 0.81)
• Racial states are inherently violent, not merely exercises of power (similarity 0.80)
• Race-based antiracism reifies into essentialism once historical openings close (similarity 0.80)