Seemingly neutral consumer preferences remain racially patterned and predictable.

Evidence

At the center of neoliberal commitment is the principle that people should be free to express and exercise their preferences as they see fit. Given that preference expression throughout modernity was to greater or lesser degree fashioned and formulated in racial terms, preference expression and its products continue to carry racial weight. Cultural preferences, for instance, remain to a considerable extent racially predictable, even if internally various and overdetermined. The preference of the overwhelming percentage of whites in the US to live exclusively among themselves, as I indicated in Chapter 3 (and the same could be said about contemporary South Africa, the Netherlands, France, even Britain, not to mention Australia and Canada), exemplifies just this point. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1783

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Residential preferences are culturally shaped, not rational givens — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 384