Racism persists in raceless states by relocating from state to private civilian life

Evidence

Civil society today then has become the dominant domain of what earlier I characterized as born again racisms. These are the racisms continuing to circulate quite ceaselessly in the shadow of racelessness, of raceless states. They are the untouchable racisms of private preference schemes placed off limits to states drawing sharp distinctions between the public and private so carefully critiqued in the past two decades or more of feminist scholarship. So civil society and the civilities on which it is built displace race and the warrant of its exclusions from state practice to privatized and individualized expression, less virile perhaps but certainly more unreachable by critical intervention. Consider who choose to live in gated communities in cities and suburbs, and why, whether in the US, South Africa or Brazil. State personality defers, if not reduces completely, to presumptive conceptions of national character and individualized accusation and recrimination on matters of race, effectively hiding the socio-cultural architecture of racial arrangements from view. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 262

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s own born-again racisms concept and to the feminist public/private critique; echoes the civil-society-vs-state displacement theme familiar from contemporary racism scholarship.
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘born again racisms’ as privatized, individualized racisms operating ‘in the shadow of racelessness’.