Refusing to count by race masks ongoing structural racial restriction

Evidence

Post-apartheid South Africa, then, has come to exemplify neoliberal racial articulation. It has transformed racial apartheid into a more generic and so supposedly less pernicious class apartheid. Presumptively less pernicious because more like the class apartheid racial neoliberalism has unleashed in cases like racial americanization and latinamericanization, in the US and Brazil especially. Its racial arrangements are thus seen to fall within the parameters of what has come to be considered the global normal and so acceptable. But acceptable because the terms of recognition now exclude the analytics of racial articulation, because the state no longer takes itself so ordered even if the structural informalities of the society continue to embed their legacy. With the secularization of race, the language of racial order disappears even if its outlines and impressions, its structural imprint, its threats continue to have social force. Much like a shroud in its ghostly appearance, race still exercises a magnetism, modes of referentiality and divisive effects, if now more informalized and sublimated into the body politic, just as it is shrugged off. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1603 (#expands, via linked claim)

The disparities are often understood as warranted if they stem from some groups having on average more serious offenses or prior violent conviction records, which can explain the more punitive outcomes they face. Nearly four decades ago, in his effort to distinguish between racial discrimination and racial differences in punishment, Alfred Blumstein (1982) wrote: If the racial disproportionality in prisons is directly attributable to criminal justice officials’ discrimination on the basis of race, a massive legal and political effort should be mobilized to redress that evil. If, however, the disproportionality results predominantly from some legally relevant difference between the races, such as a corresponding differential involvement in crime, then the charge of “racism” would not be justified. Indeed, it could be more harmful than helpful. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 557 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Outlawing explicit race measures resegregates schools through residential sorting — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 394; Formal rejection of racial profiling leaves racialized incarceration rates untouched — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 466; California’s 2003 Racial Privacy Initiative sought to shield private racial discrimination from state scrutiny — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1767 (+21 more)

Broader Connections

• Abolishing official race language can mask persisting racialized structural inequalities as class inequalities. #expands (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1603
• Racial disparity counts as warranted only when legally relevant factors explain it #complicates (0.72) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 557