Race still delimits civil membership even when racial speech is silenced

Evidence

Civil society has various ways to delimit the status of its members, if not of membership itself. What I have characterized as “born again racism” reveals that race continues to serve as a principal modality of such delimitation, even as racial reference is officially silenced. More forcefully still, publicly charging racism is increasingly considered as less than civil. All this also suggests that behind the niceties of civility, violence continues pointedly to characterize civil society. The death of civility is more pressingly the death threatened and effected behind the cloak of civility, in civil society’s name, with the acquiescence if not endorsement of the inhabitants, its citizens. The erosion of civility begins to render that social violence naked. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 290

Categorization

• XREF: The notion that naming racism is itself treated as uncivil parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay’s theme of politeness regulating speech as class signaling. — connects to: Race quietly continues to structure membership even where racial talk is silenced. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 290; Racial dog whistles replaced explicit slurs after the civil rights movement — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 89; Civil-rights laws reduced blatant racism but left subtler discrimination intact
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that civility is a cloak for state violence, and that the erosion of civility merely exposes rather than creates it, undercuts the standard liberal defense of civil discourse as the alternative to violence.