Raceless melancholia denies racial exclusion while compulsively re-invoking its terms.

Evidence

Raceless melancholia adds a twist. It screens off the violence of such exclusions even from conscious recognition at the cost of deepening the sense of one’s (social) loss through denial, removing the terms of reference for a state the denial of which cannot be completely sustained. Hence the ongoing need to keep invoking the terms it is insisted (ought to) have (or have had) no reference. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 697 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Antiracialism, it turns out, takes hold – becomes insistent, one might say begins to make itself heard – once the antiracist struggles have achieved their initial but incomplete goals. Antiracialism marks the moment that a society is accepted into (or even as a momentary moral leader of) the world. It marks, in a word, the moment of globalization’s relative (and repeated) triumph. To be of the world, in the world, a worldly society, racism nominally has been rejected. Now the category of race must be erased. But we are being asked to give up on race before and without addressing the legacy, the roots, the scars of racisms’ histories, the weights of race. We are being asked to give up on the word, the concept, the category, at most the categorizing. But not, pointedly not, the conditions for which those terms stand. In the beginning was the deed; in the end, to undo the deed, the word should not be uttered. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 123 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A raceless society denies racism while constantly re-invoking the terms of its denial. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 697; Denying race as fiction is a reaction against imposed being; Racism persists without explicit racial language, operating through denial and apology — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1867 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• A raceless society denies racism while constantly re-invoking the terms of its denial. #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 697
• Antiracialism demands abandoning race discourse while leaving racist conditions untouched #complicates (0.76) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 123
• Denying race as fiction is a reaction against imposed being #complicates (0.72)