Race persists under neoliberalism by mutating into coded private arrangements

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines racial neoliberalism’s core claim: race’s elasticity lets it survive by becoming invisible and privatized.
• XREF: Connects to the invisibility theme in Ellison’s Invisible Man and to critical race theory’s discussion of colorblindness as a new racial formation. — connects to: Private racial exclusions fall outside state reach under neoliberalism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1768; Racial ordering persists by relocating from public law to private spheres — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1845; Neoliberal urban governance produces racially differentiated poverty through market mechanisms — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 5