On Are we all postracial yet?

If the postracial is a coherent formation, it is produced not by ideological lock-step but by distributed affinities and relations in a transnational space of interconnection and exchange. The neoliberal erasure of ‘ … the structural conditions of racial reproduction and racist articulation’ (34) and the clouding of the historicity of racisms produces postraciality as ‘the illusion that the dream of the nonracial has already been realized’ (180). This illusion is familiar in writing on the postracial that focuses on the denial – be it through the averted gaze of ‘color-blindness’, or the official state prohibition of racism, or the triumphalism of strategic declarations of the ‘end of racism’ – of enduring racialized inequality. Goldberg’s advance is to explore how the illusion has become increasingly weaponized; that far from signalling the end of race, it represents an emergent ‘neo-raciality, racism’s extension if not resurrection’ (24).