Goldwater’s left hand: Post-raciality and the roots of the post-racial racist state

Abstract

Post-racial discourse rests on the allegation of a particular undoing to which we must urgently attend. There is almost nothing empirically credible about this pseudo-historical narrative structure, yet as a (growing) field of knowledge production, the post-racial discursive regime is no less formidable and far-ranging. Perhaps most importantly, it has attempted to reconstitute (and has undeniably already altered) some of the operative truth assumptions of racial discourse writ large: as a teleological marking, post-racialism minimally posits that the long modern era’s reliance on various iterations of racial power/violence—from modalities of human classification to strategies of mass geographic containment and social liquidation—has yielded to other forms of social ordering, which are no longer centrally premised on this particular form of human differentiation and brutal hierarchy.