Racial democracy made inherited racial inequalities appear to be personal choices

Evidence

The legacy of a racial democracy that insists on racial incorporation in the name of a new national “race” while privileging euro-mimesis and blanqueamiento/branqueamento offered an early experimental prototype for neoliberal raceless racism to emulate and extend. Racial democracy was supposed to produce a new nation amalgamated into a single and singular racial identity through miscegenation, racial intermarriage, and formal equality. It served at the same time to render significant racially marked substantive inequalities – in income, wealth, educational and employment access, criminalization, residential quality, and the like – beyond the reach of reform or redress, if not altogether invisible. Racial democracy throughout Latin America thus has meant democracy in which the historical legacy of racially inequitable structures is inscribed but indiscernible, embedded but intangible, urgent but untouchable. In democratizing substantive inequalities, racial democracy made them seem a matter purely of personal choice or individualized effort. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1223

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism where formal inclusivity occludes substantive inequality by individualizing it is dense, portable, and invertible across many domains.
• XREF: Parallels US post-racial discourse and the claim that acknowledgement of racial presence coexists with refusal to address structural effects. — connects to: Meritocracy is a fairy tale masking class as individual choice — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 222; Liberal democracy’s neutral ideals mask racial and gendered domination — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 406
• SEED: Angle: ‘how ideologies of inclusion manufacture individual responsibility’ — an essay tracing the Latin American racial democracy template into contemporary diversity-and-inclusion rhetoric in corporations.