European post-WWII racial denial wants race to erase itself but never succeeds

Evidence

For Europeans generally, then, race is not, or really is no longer. European racial denial concerns wanting race in the wake of World War II categorically to implode, to erase itself. This is a wishful evaporation never quite enacted, never satisfied. A desire simultaneously frustrated and displaced. As diffuse as they are, racist implications linger, silenced but assumed, always already returned and haunting. Buried, but alive. Odorless traces but suffocating in the wake of their nevertheless denied diffusion. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 815

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s broader thesis on racial denial and to the modern obsession narrative in the securitization chapters — the denial is productive, not silencing, like the ‘govern through crime’ logic. — connects to: Europe’s Holocaust focus erases its colonial race history — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 823
• APHORISMS: ‘Buried, but alive. Odorless traces but suffocating in the wake of their nevertheless denied diffusion’ reads as genuine wisdom about denial’s persistence.
• SEED: Essay angle: how post-trauma societies (post-WWII Europe, post-1994 South Africa) attempt categorical erasure of their founding categories of exclusion and why the erasure always fails and returns.