Postracial ideology functions as the most sophisticated silencer of antiracist speech

Evidence

Months into Obama’s presidency, the postracialists slammed down their new ground rules for race relations: Criticize millions of Black people whenever you want, as often as you want. That’s not racialism or racism or hate. You’re not even talking about race. But whenever you criticize a single White discriminator, that’s race-speak, that’s hate-speak, that’s being racist. If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1233

Categorization

• XREF: Directly ties back to Kendi’s causal inversion across the book — racist ideas exist to silence antiracist resisters; the postracial variant is the current form. — connects to: The dismissal of reverse racism can silence what the marginalized are actually saying — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 61; Americans are taught to recognize only overt hate speech as racism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 653
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of criticism rules — you may critique the oppressed en masse but never a single oppressor — is a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism of how ‘postracial’ discourse polices speech.