Antiracism Limited

Abstract

Liberal enthusiasm over the arrival of a ‘post-racial’ era in the USA found ecstatic release at the 2008 election of the first African-American to the presidency. Several years have passed since that event, and the idea of ‘post-race’ remains a potent, if uneasy, keyword within the national imaginary. Authorizing ‘official antiracisms’ of our day, post-race sanctions the governmentalities of racial neoliberalism, and forecloses alternative paradigms for antiracist struggle. Equally, it registers as a cruel joke of sorts, turning on studied denials of abiding inequalities and open to the lash of ridicule and scorn. At once absurd and alluring, post-race reveals the cultural career of a keyword marked by power and authority as well as tenacious counter-claims that show up its conceits and specious allure.A rich body of scholarship has emerged in recent years to unpack the meanings and implications of the term. These works typically take the Obama moment, unprecedented and consequential, as a key signifying theatre. This essay, however, begins elsewhere, suggesting instead that the 2008 victory constitutes a denouement, a narrative climax to epistemic struggles that shaped racial discourse over decades prior to and, indeed, anticipating Obama's arrival as post-racial icon. Offering a genealogical pre-history of post-race, the analysis uses the analytical lens of ‘bricolage’ to trace a range of articulations over a 40-year span that concludes with Obama's 2008 victory. The essay maps the riotous ascendance of post-race as well as its faltering claims to authority to reveal the conditions of possibility that gave rise to, and continue to provide traction for, the idea of the post-racial. Highlighting key epistemological shifts ushered in by the concept, the essay substantiates the terms of a third ‘racial break’ that works to foreclose all but those antiracist projects that serve the incentives of neoliberal capital.