Postracialism

What does the image of Rachel Dolezal want? This paper intersects myth, violence and racial structures by examining how the acceptance of Dolezal achieves the exact opposite of post-racialism and racial justice. I put forward reasoning that outlines how this phenomenon and the acceptance of Dolezal’s rhetoric is part of an ongoing cultural violence against people of colour. Race is a social construct however I object to the notion that this entire construct can be collapsed by the braiding of one’s hair or the application of a darker shade of makeup.

""""Contesting the Myth of a ‘Post Racial’ Era brings together educational scholars across disciplines in higher education to reframe the discourse on race and racism in education in the
Obama era and to explore structural, environmental, cultural, and political implications of race and racism in education. The volume gives explicit attention to contesting the myth of post-racialism in U.S. education by examining racial inequality across the K-16 spectrum, through examination of classroom practices, educational policies, educational research, and equity and access. Policy makers, educators, and academics with an interest in raising the achievement levels of students of color as well as access to greater opportunities will
have interest in this book. It can be used for professional development at the K-12 and higher education level and for course adoption in college classrooms, particularly in programs
and courses where race is an explicit area of study.
""

This essay argues that Senator Rand Paul’s address at Howard University in April 2013, meant to bridge racial divides between the Republican Party and Black voters, actually represented a second-generation Southern Strategy. After tracing the original Southern Strategy, designed to polarize the electorate based on fears of Black enfranchisement, to the GOP in the 1960s, the essay defines its new form as a rhetoric depending on selective amnesia, neoliberalism, and postracialism. After demonstrating how each of those characteristics surfaced in Paul’s address, the essay discusses the implications of his speech and his later attempts to learn from his failures.

This article examines and critiques digital media culture and its embedded postracial logics through the resistance strategies of Black women online. Specifically, I am interested in everyday resistance strategies as "seemingly innocuous" communication, which is understood from theorizations of "hidden transcripts" that black publics utilize to counteract dominance. In order to explore "everyday resistance" I employed focus groups with 20 Black women and present patterns of resistance strategies online, such as visual signifiers and posting news articles. Secondly, I interrogate how these resistance strategies "talk back" to and circumvent the underpinnings of digital media culture through the postracial logics of individuality and networked influence. Ultimately, Black women's interconnected identities reveal the flaws of digital culture as postracial by demonstrating their resistance strategies that must work around any assumption of a "postracial parity."

During the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, idealistic talk that America was on the verge of entering a post-racial age was at its apogee. A set of demographic changes was apparent in America and the nation was poised to elect its first African American president. The feeling that the United States was back on the trajectory of the arc of justice was electric, and faith in individualism, with its ties to the distant ideal of color-blindness, felt vindicated. Andrew Delbanco put it this way: “there was suddenly a sense that one could believe in a ‘post-racial’ future without being a dupe or a chump.” Post-racialism conveys the idea that we in significant part had somehow risen above race and racism and heralded the tipping point of a demographic and cultural trend. The nation’s racial habits, according to this view, have been destabilized by the browning of America; a shift resulting from the growth of the non-white population in the United States, along with increased patterns of immigration from Mexico and Latin America, the rise of multiracial or mixed-race identification, and higher rates of cross-racial or ethnic intimacies. This is post-racialism as a description and what it intends to describe is a trend in demographics and self-conception. Alternatively, the idea of post-race is offered as a normative ideal that is a prescription for society’s racial ills, and what it prescribes is a guiding vision of transcendence from racial beliefs, categories, and habits. Post-racialism either as description or prescription is presented as an epoch-defining intervention, a movement that is happening now. That good post-racial was chased away by a train of racially charged conflicts, such as the protests after the killing of Oscar Grant by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer on New Year’s Day of 2009, and then the #BlackLivesMatter protests that spanned from September 2014 through January 2015. Critics of the post-racial idea and ideal pointed to these painful events, as well as to a standard array of sociological indicators, such as rates of incarceration and disparities in education and employment, that clearly demonstrated that race still matters. Insisting otherwise in the face of these facts is to give a naïve version of post-racialism.
As stunning a counter-example as the protests were, a satisfactory response to post-racialism as an ideal requires more than pointing out the inaccuracy of the idea as a sociological and demographic trend. An adequate response, as Paul C. Taylor made clear, would identify what it gets right, but also answer how it is deficient as a normative ideal and how those deficiencies continue to taint the best-intentioned liberal post-racial ideals and activism. Responses to the ideal of post-racialism have not done that; instead they have concentrated on its deleterious consequences on civil rights law and social policy, and its use by naïve, cynical, or partisan political actors. It is accused of playing into the hands of white privilege, institutional racism, not confronting the real problems poised by implicit biases against non-whites, and justifying the reactionary political project of denying or neglecting the consequences of America’s racial history that aims at limiting or repealing civil rights legislation. More is needed to fully respond to the post-racial, so I add two criticisms: post-racialism as a normative ideal depends on a pastiche of history that invites the problems outlined above and that it leads to the vice of disrespecting persons.

This essay recites the history of the Polley v. Ratcliff litigation and interrogates its relevance for modern considerations of racial inequality in America. The Polley case began in 1850s with the wrongful kidnapping of the children of Mr. Peyton Polley, an emancipated African slave who lived in Ohio. The litigation continued from 1851 to 1859 without clear resolution. Although this incident has been discussed at length by historians, the litigation itself came to a remarkable conclusion on April 6, 2012. On that day, some 162 years after this Dred Scott-era kidnapping, Judge Darrell Pratt of the Circuit Court of Wayne County, West Virginia, entered a decree declaring that Mr. Polley wrongfully kidnapped children — Harrison, Louisa, and Anna — “were, and are, FREE PERSONS as of March 22, 1859." This declaration represented a monumental historical moment in West Virginia history, and it represents, as this essay will argue, an opportunity to consider the question of what our societal response to slavery and racism has been over time and what it ought to be in the twenty-first century. The essay considers the various modes through which Americans look at the history of slavery and race-race consciousness, racial reparations, and post racialism — and then it argues that the Polley litigation represents a different model for considering the American history of race, a model akin to truth and reconcilliation.

This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situating the film within the ideological context of postracialism and the proximate context of the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, anti-gun activism, and the Trump presidency, I suggest that the film figures Chicago as a racial threat to white, feminized, suburban life. Mostly dispensing with conventional racial markers, Roth's film paints Chicago as a space of immiseration and death to generate a racialized threat of sexual assault, conjuring an uncanny scene of sexual violence followed by a lynching. The film models postracial sovereignty, a model of authority constantly producing death to ward off the threat of Blackness and preserve the white and masculine prerogatives of political liberalism. The film illustrates how political liberalism wields the threat of death to attempt the suppression of antiracist, feminist rebellions offering understandings of life that diverge from liberalism's white masculinity.

Despite declarations of race's irrelevance, the Conservative Party of Canada's (CPC) stance on race-related policies under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's leadership was key to every electoral campaign it fought. Moreover, it is not despite but because of their race that racialized political elites have been incorporated into the CPC and its antecedents. Indeed, beginning in the 1990s, the inclusion of Asian Members of Parliament (MP) became for the Reform Party of Canada, a weapon in the struggle for electoral success; that is, part of an era of Conservative racial realignment. By tracing the role of Asian Conservative MP in the rise of the Reform Party since its 1987 inception and the electoral success of the CPC (2006–2015), this article explores how racialized political elites become crucial to the legitimization of the racial state when it is through a discourse of inclusion that exclusion is crafted.

This essay reads novels by Colson Whitehead as sustained allegorical engagements with race’s conceptual and discursive mutation across capitalism’s historical development, and also as highly self-reflexive meditations on the novel of ethnicity’s formal affinities with race’s making and unmaking in the service of capital accumulation. Special attention is given to Whitehead’s 2006 novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, which recounts the story of an African American “nomenclature consultant” tasked with rebranding an ex-slave town originally known for its barbed wire production but eager to attract the business of an up-and-coming software firm. An allegory for the changing technologies by which borders are controlled—from the material constraints of barbed wire to the “hidden” fiber optic wires that now mediate production on a global scale—I argue that Apex links labor abstractions wrought by digital post-Fordism’s rise to race’s remaking under neoliberal market logics of qualitative uniqueness. A coda examines how Apex’s preoccupation with the discourse of brand management yokes Whitehead’s critique of “postracial” capitalism to questions of “postracial” novelistic practice similarly broached by Chimamanda Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole, Percival Everett, and Michael Thomas.

The chapter demonstrates how the satire of Ishmael Reed has evolved from a stage which frequently criticises through non-standard sexuality to a stage which frequently criticises through logical argumentation (as can be seen in novels published in 1990s and 2010s). By discussing examples from Reed's 1993 novel Japanese by Spring, the chapter connects these two modes of satire to two types of American racism: overt (present in the public discourse till the Civil Rights Movement) and covert (present in the public discourse after the Civil Rights Movement). It concludes by illustrating that as overt racism became unacceptable in American public discourse, Ishmael Reed updated his satire so that it would be argument-driven and could remain an effective type of social critique even under the new circumstances.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the 44th President of the United States, raised hopes for many that as a country we were entering a post-racial moment, that the twin legacies of oppression and slavery were overcome, not only in the United States, but the world. That same period, however, brought crises of authority caused by neo-liberalism, police violence, and mass incarceration that have consistently set back the very racial progress that Obama’s presidency seemed to inaugurate. Far from being post-racial, the Obama years were a period of constant racial crisis, the repercussions of which were felt daily since the killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson in the summer of 2014. It took the election of an African American to the nation’s highest office to uncover a level of racial hatred the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s, requiring an analysis of the relationship between multiracialism and post-racialism, as well as how whiteness operates in the United States, to fully appreciate what has come to pass. The election of Donald Trump as President has been a clear rejection of the post-racial era ushered in by Obama. Much like our more recent experiment in racial democracy, there are parallels between what happened with the overthrow of Reconstruction, America’s startling experiment in biracial democracy after the Civil War and today. The historical roots of the “whitelash” that fueled Trump’s victory lie in a prior racial backlash to an unprecedented attempt to grant African Americans citizenship during the period of Reconstruction. Based on a book chapter-in-progress for a volume on the Black Intellectual Tradition in America, this presentation discusses how the 21st century could potentially mark a new low in American race relations—or a “new American dilemma”.

The chapter demonstrates how the satire of Ishmael Reed has evolved from a stage which frequently criticises through non-standard sexuality to a stage which frequently criticises through logical argumentation (as can be seen in novels published in 1990s and 2010s). By discussing examples from Reed's 1993 novel Japanese by Spring, the chapter connects these two modes of satire to two types of American racism: overt (present in the public discourse till the Civil Rights Movement) and covert (present in the public discourse after the Civil Rights Movement). It concludes by illustrating that as overt racism became unacceptable in American public discourse, Ishmael Reed updated his satire so that it would be argument-driven and could remain an effective type of social critique even under the new circumstances.

Philosophers who work on race and racism have been reluctant to embrace the notion that the U.S. is, or will soon be, a postracial society. For many, this view is refuted by a wealth of evidence that racism persists in many forms and that race continues to have a significant impact on one’s life chances. Nevertheless, some critics of postracialism
have refused to reject it in principle or have exempted a particular variety of it from their critiques. In this essay, I attempt to show that the ideal of a postracial society is actually a combination of two contradictory tendencies, each defined by its temporality. Distinguishing these tendencies allows us to see that there are two fundamentally different types of postracialism with contradictory assumptions and conflicting priorities.

This essay argues that Senator Rand Paul’s address at Howard University in April 2013, meant to bridge racial divides between the Republican Party and Black voters, actually represented a second-generation Southern Strategy. After tracing the original Southern Strategy, designed to polarize the electorate based on fears of Black enfranchisement, to the GOP in the 1960s, the essay defines its new form as a rhetoric depending on selective amnesia, neoliberalism, and postracialism. After demonstrating how each of those characteristics surfaced in Paul’s address, the essay discusses the implications of his speech and his later attempts to learn from his failures.