Counterfactual questions about a raceless history conceal denial
Evidence
One way of posing this question of post-racist states is to address what modern social formations might have emerged had they not been so racially conceived and weighted in the various ways mapped in this book. How, one might ask in other words, would modern states have formed but for race as an ordering principle? The shape of this question, however, as hinted in the close of the previous paragraph, is consistent with the presumptions of racelessness articulated in chapter 8, now universalized not just geographically but as a matter of nostalgic retrospection, historical memory in denial. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 127
Categorization
- SEED: An essay angle: why ‘what if there were no race’ thinking is itself nostalgia in denial, drawing attention away from present imaginative politics.
- XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”
Related
- Post-racial claims actually deny ongoing racism rather than racial identity (similarity 0.80)
- A raceless society denies racism while constantly re-invoking the terms of its denial. (similarity 0.79)
- Racelessness forms differ in their founding motives and effects (similarity 0.78)
- Twentieth-century states claimed modernity by rendering their racial workings invisible (similarity 0.78)
- Racelessness extended racial historicism rather than contradicting it (similarity 0.78)