The Plasticity of Race

Abstract

This essay explores Jacques Derrida’s nonteleological conception of postracism, which he elucidated in his unpublished response to Ètienne Balibar’s keynote address at the tRACEs conference held at UC Irvine in 2003. Racism, for Derrida, is intrinsically “plastic,” which predisposes it to future metonymic forms even if racism stricto sensu were to end. Building on his observations, I argue that these metonymies also extend historically backward. The metaphysical distinction between physis and nomos that he identifies as the condition of racism also provides the basis for family: the most ancient and familiar form through which racism expresses itself. Racism is originarily plastic. In conjunction with my reading of Derrida, I critique the contemporary conflation of racism and white supremacy; the doctrinaire view that racism is only institutional (prejudice plus power); and the discourse of microaggressions, whose outsized political currency arguably transforms them into quasi-macroaggressions by conceiving them as expressions of white supremacy.