Racial exclusion becomes legally unactionable once reframed as private moral preference

Evidence

The curtaining off of the racial from the public domain, from the formal sphere of politics, and restricting it to the privacy of occasional individual choice and (self-)determination make race and by extension the effects it produces as racist discrimination and exclusion matters of personal morality rather than public law. Race is rendered accordingly before, beneath, or beyond the law. The racial dimensions of crime, social practice, and ultimately state action (from profiling to genocides) are cordoned off-limits to the law. They may be moral or ethical matters, as Agamben puts it, tied ineluctably to the private choices of individual preference. They accordingly are not issues of legal responsibility. As strictly and reductively moral matters, racist acts and institutional patterns or effects are less likely to be prosecuted by the law; they are regarded as personally offensive, morals offenses, more like pornography than injurious. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1875

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s framework of the state of exception and to how legal structures channel racism into private morality, echoing the standing interest in decorum toward corpses and institutional obfuscation. — connects to: Community-led housing commons exclude people through classed and racialised decision-making processes. — Yael Arbell, The Circle of Commoning:…, 88; Racelessness redraws public norms while privatizing the institutional mechanisms that perpetuate exclusion — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 959; Racial ordering persists by relocating from public law to private spheres — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1845 (+3 more)