Neoliberalism removed race from public vocabulary while privatizing it

Evidence

With neoliberalism, I have been suggesting, race is purged from the explicit lexicon of public administrative arrangements and their assessment while remaining robust and unaddressed in the private realm. Neoliberalism, as I elaborated most explicitly in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, sought expression as racial secularization. Race faded into the very structures, embedded in the architecture, of neoliberal sociality, in its logics and social relations. Race lost its social sacrality while retaining its personal cache and privatized resonance, even in the public sphere. Michael Richards’s rant about “niggers” onstage at a comedy club in Los Angeles is just one prominent instance of a much wider cast(e), even as the state remains vigilant about equal protection law. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1781

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core definition of ‘racial secularization’ and racial privatization under neoliberalism — race in the private realm, absent from public administrative lexicon.
• XREF: Connects to how the corporate diversity talk of the 1990s-2000s publicly named some differences while leaving deeper structural race unmentionable — and to the ‘colorblind’ era that civil-rights rhetoric paradoxically spawned. — connects to: Neoliberal rationality discursively erases stratification and power differences among speakers. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 323; Neoliberals reframed inequality as apolitical difference to erase colonial exploitation. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 404; Emphasis on merit and racelessness accompanied shifts away from the welfare state — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1739 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: the Michael Richards moment as a rupture — the private racial cachetage leaking into public when the ritual boundary of ‘the stage’ suspends the norm, and how comedy clubs became the site where the privatized slur escaped its confinement.
• CANDY: The all-too-perfect pun ‘cast(e)’ verbalizing the caste-like structure of racial privatization is a quotable gem.