Antiracialism demands abandoning race discourse while leaving racist conditions untouched

Evidence

Antiracialism, it turns out, takes hold – becomes insistent, one might say begins to make itself heard – once the antiracist struggles have achieved their initial but incomplete goals. Antiracialism marks the moment that a society is accepted into (or even as a momentary moral leader of) the world. It marks, in a word, the moment of globalization’s relative (and repeated) triumph. To be of the world, in the world, a worldly society, racism nominally has been rejected. Now the category of race must be erased. But we are being asked to give up on race before and without addressing the legacy, the roots, the scars of racisms’ histories, the weights of race. We are being asked to give up on the word, the concept, the category, at most the categorizing. But not, pointedly not, the conditions for which those terms stand. In the beginning was the deed; in the end, to undo the deed, the word should not be uttered. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 123

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines antiracialism as distinct from antiracism — the former drops the category while preserving the conditions; the latter attacks the structures themselves.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on sacrifice and ritual — both here and in the sacrifice piece, the category/word is abandoned while underlying conditions persist untouched. — connects to: The dismissal of reverse racism can silence what the marginalized are actually saying — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 61; Antiracialism opposes racial categories while antiracism opposes imposed racial conditions. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 84
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the word should not be uttered’ as a contemporary heresy — how colorblindness as an ideal functions as moral-political-correctness theater in globalized states.