Race persists through code and proxy even as its formal marks fade

Evidence

The elasticity of race – its mutability, adaptability, and motility – enables the continued insinuation of racial meanings, arrangements, and orderings into metamorphosed social circumstances. This racial marking has continued as race, under neoliberalizing pressures, has become less explicit, less visible, less obviously a mark of formal state formation. “Invisible man” has deepened into invisible racial arrangements of social conditions. In short, race is now circulated more readily and openly in private spheres than in formal public ones. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1845 (#expands, via linked claim)

This participant is grappling with the dilemma of trying to lay claim to ‘African’ identity while at the same time resisting the association that the category has with blackness (‘the things they do’). Since we already know that this participant excluded himself from the category ‘African’ based on race (Interview extract 27), we should be suspicious of the reason he offers in Interview extract 26, namely the actions of Africans. This appears to be another example of ‘separation de-”racialized”’. When ‘race’ is removed as a reason for separation (instead citing actions), racial separation arguments have more credibility. — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 170 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colorblind antiracialism gains force only after partial antiracist gains begin succeeding — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 123; Interaction persists even where coercion appears total — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 323; Race categories shift with historical power configurations (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Race-blind procedures fail because correlated proxy variables still leak bias #expands (0.95)
• Race persists under neoliberalism by mutating into coded private arrangements #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1845
• Racial separation persists by being re-framed in non-racial terms #expands (0.92) — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 170
• Race supplies the coherence that masks arbitrary state power #complicates (0.72)