Erasing racial categories from public accounting also erases the discrimination they record

Evidence

In diluting, if not erasing, race in all public affairs of the state, neoliberal proponents nevertheless seek to privatize racisms alongside most everything else. They seek, that is, to protect preference determination and expression behind a wall of privacy, untouchable by state intervention, the outcome of which is to privatize race-based exclusions. Categories of race disappear as much from keeping account of discrimination as from producing the discrimination itself, thus leaving the condition it is supposed to articulate, to mark and express as well as identify and assess, as untouchable as it tends now to be untouched. Devoid of race in the public sphere, racism – as modes of racially driven subjection and exclusion, debilitation and humiliation – is freed up to circulate as robustly as individuals or non-government (or non-government-funded) institutions should choose in private. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1772

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Core mechanism: the same colorblind move that ends public categorization also ends the evidentiary record of exclusion, making discrimination structurally unfixable — a dense, two-sided dialectic worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: State-imposed whitening policy erased race from national law — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1171; Eliminating racial data collection protects rather than ends racial discrimination; The apparent erasure of race and the ongoing racial ordering are one process — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 958 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Eliminating racial data collection protects rather than ends racial discrimination #corroborates (0.95)
• The apparent erasure of race and the ongoing racial ordering are one process #expands (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 958
• Erasure of racial vocabulary forecloses ethical recognition of harm. #qualifies (0.88)
• Banning racial data collection protects private discrimination from scrutiny #exemplifies (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1767
• Nominalizations erase the agents of discrimination and racism #corroborates (0.80)