Nonracialism can serve as cover for neoliberal state retrenchment.

Evidence

Biko’s Black Consciousness nevertheless characterized nonracialism as a “white politics,” an empty universalism that placed racial strategizing and organizing off limits to antiracist resistance, thus limiting its effective reach and range. Nonracialism in this sense offers the perfect conceptual partner for a neoliberal politics bent on delimiting state power and empowering the interests of privately preferred partnerships and projects, where the already familiar are the trusted and tried, if passing only the loyalty test. Race continues to exert social effect, even where the category is placed under official erasure. The assertively critical attacks on affirmative action are a case in point. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1621

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the familiar US-style colorblindness argument — that formal race-neutrality masks ongoing racial effect; Goldberg explicitly draws this analogy in the following sentences.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how ‘post-racial’ formalism in any context (South Africa, the US) functionally partners with neoliberal privatization by forbidding race-conscious state redress.