Racial revolutions bring piecemeal gains that typically trigger new backlashes and subtler exclusions

Evidence

The legacies of abolitionist, civil rights, and anti-apartheid social movements have made abundantly evident that there is no ultimate narrative of absolute redemptive transformation resulting from racial revolutions. There are just the piecemeal changes and shifts - some small, ameliorative, accumulative; others largely and to lesser or greater degree groundshifting. But ultimately even the larger changes produce, if not necessarily more often than not, backlashes, changes in racial expression and modes of exclusion themselves. They may become less overt, more subtle, more carefully formulated. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1915

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the linear progress narrative of civil rights and anti-apartheid histories; resonates with the author’s overarching argument that racial logics mutate rather than disappear. — connects to: Successful anti-racist movements trigger renewed, subtler forms of racial exclusion, not elimination — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1915; Racial restriction’s victory deflated the manufactured solidarity that had sustained it; Confederate monument construction spikes track eras of white political reassertion. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 342