Antiracist victories across three eras were each defused by formal legal colorblindness

Evidence

The shifts from broad, globally interconnected antiracist social movements in each instance mapped above to local and much narrower antiracialist commitments represent a turn to formalism in the face of impending material shifts of potentially immense proportion. Antiracist social mobilizations in each historical case fueled gathering momentum to open up institutional access and invigorate competition, to transform voting patterns and relations of power, to undo the easy and complacent stabilities of neighborhoods and cultural sedimentation. Privileges came unfixed, profitabilities were imperiled, property desanctified, powers challenged. Antiracist mobilization had sought in each case to end the immobilizing and terrorizing conditions racist order had made manifest and maintained, manufactured and managed. The immobilization under racist repression gave way – if not in – to mobilization, terror turned to transformability, trauma triggered trespass, all threatening if not an overturning at least a turning over. … No sooner had these shifts been successfully signaled, if not fully effected, than the force(s) of racial order reached for the formalism of the law. In the face of instabilities and insecurities, state recourse in each instance quickly reduced to an insistence upon formal equality. There are of course some not insignificant differences between the instances I cite. Nevertheless, at the level of generalization, Reconstruction, “We shall overcome,” and “a new South Africa” all gave way in a blur to a statemandated nonracialism, the drive for some sort of substantive equality to a nominal categorical blindness under but neither before nor beyond the law. Formalism “saved” racism in each case by abandoning (or at least threatening to abandon) race. Call this born again racism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 127

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that formalism ‘saved’ racism by abandoning race — that antiracist success itself triggers a formalist countermovement — is a dense, counterintuitive dialectical argument worth sitting with.
• XREF: Directly serves reader’s threatened-privilege generalization test: does the anticipatory status-reclamation by dominant groups (here whites across Reconstruction, Civil Rights, South Africa) replicate the pattern the reader studies in race and wants to test across gender/religion/nativity. — connects to: Colorblind antiracialism gains force only after partial antiracist gains begin succeeding — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 123; Antiracial colorblindness erases the very vocabulary needed to press racial claims — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 122; Antiracist reforms repackaged white supremacy as color blindness — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 91 (+14 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘born again racism’ — formal equality as the historical script dominant groups use each time substantive antiracist gains threaten privilege — could become a comparative essay across identity axes.

Broader Connections

• Color blindness functions to re-anonymize racial rule after anti-racist exposure #corroborates (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1728
• Colorblind formalism rescued racism when movements threatened its material order. #corroborates (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 128
• Antiracial colorblindness erases the very vocabulary needed to press racial claims #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 122
• Colorblind equal treatment perpetuates rather than ends racial hierarchy #corroborates (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1072
• Color-blindness rhetoric was used to preserve white privilege #corroborates (0.85)
• Colorblindness ideology rearticulated civil rights gains into a new racism #corroborates (0.85) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 192
• Antiracist reforms repackaged white supremacy as color blindness #corroborates (0.80) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 91
• Colorblind measures reinforce existing racial privilege despite egalitarian intent #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 117
• French colorblindness law masks state-driven racial inequities that feed extremism recruitment #exemplifies (0.80) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 773
• Modern antiracism consolidated in three distinct historical mobilizations #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 86
• French law’s colorblindness coexists with pervasive raced policing and inequity. #exemplifies (0.75) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 774
• Colorblind mestizaje narratives re-suppress already marginalized racial subjects #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1840
• Black-white conflict shifted from ending formal exclusion to redistributing resources #expands (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3315
• Line prosecutors believe colorblindness eliminates racially biased decisions #exemplifies (0.75)
• Colorblind inclusion of Black authors is a covert form of tokenism #exemplifies (0.70) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 85