Racelessness redraws public norms while privatizing the institutional mechanisms that perpetuate exclusion

Evidence

Europe thus represents what the contemporary project of racelessness implies politically: First, the removal of stigma from interracial sociality, and with it largely the de-eroticization of the racial in interracial sociality and sexuality. This, to be sure, has considerable appeal, not least for those in societies long bruised by these very restrictions and their attendant exacerbations, exclusions, excisions, evasions, and erosions of the social fabric. Second, a shift in the burden of legal proof in the face of charges of institutional racism from those making the charges to those being charged. A significant shift, indeed, signaling at least a seriousness about facing up to the challenge. But both lead also to the shift to personalize and individualize racism, to reduce racist violence to a few rotten folks, to restrict apartness especially in residential, educational, and employment arrangements and access to the untouchable segregating schemas of personal preference and the lure of the familial and familiar. In the limit case, it reifies the impossibility, given the absence of a language of characterization, explanation, and condemnation, of identifying the problematic, of addressing wrongs, cutting off – as others have commented in the case of America – grief from grievance. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 959

Categorization

• SEED: Direct essay angle: everyday interracial warmth and legislated racelessness as the very vehicle that relocates segregation into ‘personal preference’ — one of the sharpest formulations of the contact/institution gap across identity axes.
• XREF: The ‘grief from grievance’ cutoff generalizes the reader’s threatened-privilege mechanism test to the legal-burden axis, and resonates with A Very Minor Prophet’s institutional failure-of-language theme. — connects to: Racial exclusion persists through institutions while personal relations integrate — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 909; Racelessness reassigns responsibility for racial outcome from state structures to individuals — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 123; Societal requirements transform into self-justifying norms devoid of social origin (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ argument that formal liberal tolerance can be a cover for re-segregated informal order.

Broader Connections

• Racelessness reassigns responsibility for racial outcome from state structures to individuals #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 123
• Racelessness individualizes and personalizes what is actually structural racism #expands (0.95)
• Neoliberal globalization privatizes institutional racisms stripped of explicit labels #expands (0.90)
• Racial exclusion becomes legally unactionable once reframed as private moral preference #responds-to (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1875
• Societal requirements transform into self-justifying norms devoid of social origin #expands (0.80)