Postwar European intellectual thought pursued three linked strategies of racial denial

Evidence

Europe’s eugenicist history in the latter part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries underwrote the Holocaust, made it thinkable, as too did the long history of Jewish expulsion from European societies, stretching from at least 1290 in England via Mittel Europa purges of the mid-teen centuries to the mid-1890s Dreyfus affair in France. The postwar intellectual clean-up accordingly hitched its cart to purging European intellectual institutions largely of at least explicit eugenicist and antisemitic expression, if not quite so clearly of their biologically determinist leanings. With few exceptions, almost all French (Sartre from roughly 1960 onwards, Memmi, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, among others egged on by Fanon’s challenges, and most persistently and formatively Austrian Eric Voegelin even before the war), mainstream European thought about race thus pursued the three interrelated paths I have raced through here: denial of race as socially, politically, and indeed morally relevant; an overriding focus on antisemitism as the real (and almost only) manifestation of racism; and the radical delinking of the intellectual and political histories of colonialism and racism. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 853

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the three-path structure of postwar European racial thought that the chapter’s argument about racial evaporation hangs on.
• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘racelessness’ argument Goldberg develops across the whole book as the European denial strategy.