Race persists through proxy topics like migration, terror, and disease

Evidence

Race, then, is itself an enduring occupation, one which in raceless contexts a critic takes up at risk, on pain of marginalization, being maligned, being considered almost mad. Its deepening invisibility is evidenced in its prevailing proxy articulations – its fixations, its pre-occupations – today in the powerful polities of the global north: migration and immigration, terrorism, contagious disease and viral spread. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1859

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the post-racial blindness thesis from earlier in this book and Goldberg’s ongoing argument that ‘racelessness’ is itself a racial formation; also resonates with how immigration panic and pandemic discourse function as coded race talk.
• SEED: Essay angle: the current wave of ‘viral spread’ panic as racialized proxy articulation — how disease metaphors carry displaced race talk in supposedly post-racial societies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compression here — ‘race as an enduring occupation a critic takes up at risk of being considered mad’ — condenses a whole theory of raceless society and the marginalization of those who name race, worth sitting with.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1859