Racial democracy prefigured today’s raceless neoliberal racism

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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Neoliberalism accordingly can be read as a response to this concern about the impending impotence of whiteness. Neoliberalism is committed to privatizing property, utilities, and social programs, to reducing state expenditures and bureaucracy, increasing efficiencies, and to individual freedom from state regulation. As the state was seen increasingly to support black employment, to increase expenditures on black education, and to increase regulation to force compliance, white neoconservatives found neoliberal commitments increasingly relevant to their interests. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1764 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racial democracy rendered structural inequality invisible and individualized; Brazil’s nominal racial democracy masks stark black-white structural disparities; Neoliberalism functioned as a racial regime in the United States — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 202 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial democracy made inherited racial inequalities appear to be personal choices #exemplifies (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1223
• Neoliberalism functioned as a defense against perceived erosion of white privilege #complicates (0.76) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1764