Critics of racism are dismissed as paranoid whistleblowers under racial neoliberalism.

Evidence

It follows, fifth, that the individualizing of discrimination and exclusion, and the slipperiness as well as ghost-like quality of racial terms, make it an often thankless, even burdensome task to point out racist discrimination. Critics of racisms are taken as akin to whistleblowers, and often treated analogously – as spoilsports, or paranoid, or just plain delusional, seeing wrong by invoking ghostly terms the prevailing social order claims to reject (which is not to deny that in some cases they may be). Racist exclusions accordingly become unreferenced even as they permeate sociality. They are society’s unspoken because unspeakable, often unrecognizable because lacking the terms of characterization or engagement, but where recognizable more often than not in deep denial. The ghost in the machine of neoliberal sociality. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1234

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to Hanchard’s Brazilian case in the next paragraph and to earlier chapters’ framing of racial denial; also echoes the ‘colorblindness as erasure’ argument common in critical race theory.