The belief that Auschwitz ended racism is itself a denial enabling its persistence.

Evidence

The decisive lesson of the [twentieth] century, as Agamben has it, for so many others. And yet the lesson at the heart of which is the unspeakable, the unmentionable, though thought by almost all. Say it not, but act in its name even as its effects are denied, are in denial. There is no racism because race was buried in the rubble of Auschwitz. Its ghosts everywhere haunting us, acting in and through us, violent convulsions attesting to its power and causing us to take note. Only too quickly to force us back into denial. Moroccans in the Netherlands, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Britain. Muselmanns everywhere, and those mistaken for them anywhere. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 832

Categorization

• XREF: Direct parallel to the claim that anti-racism discourse itself can function as a new mode of racial exclusion — resonates with Goldberg’s broader thesis on racial Europeanization.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how ‘Muselmanns everywhere’ extends Agamben’s figure of the camp’s living dead past its Holocaust origin into a general category for Europe’s racialized outsiders.