While many liberals suggest that with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency the United States has become a post-racial society, many conservatives have now taken the opposite position, prompted by the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, that racism is alive and well in the American republic.[1] According to many right-wing pundits and politicians extending from Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson, Judge Sotomayor is a ‘racist’ and a ‘bigot’ because of a largely decontextualized 32-word quotation abstracted from a speech she gave in 2001 in which she stated: ‘I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life’.[2] Newt Gingrich ignored the broader context in which the quotation appeared, insisting that Sotomayor’s statement was symptomatic of a new type of racism. He exclaimed in Twitter-like fashion, ‘Imagine a judicial nominee said “my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman” new racism is no better than old racism’.[3] All of this saber-rattling rhetoric about the emergence of a new kind of racism suggests rather ironically that whites rather than people of color are the real victims of personal and institutional racism and points to a kind of historical amnesia that not only rewrites the meaning of racism, it also points to a long-standing fear among many conservatives that diversity rather the bigotry is the real threat to democracy. What the relentless attack on Judge Sotomayor suggests is that the public morality of American life and social policy regarding matters of racial justice are increasingly subject to a politics of denial. Denial in this case is not merely about the failure of public memory or the refusal to know, but an active ongoing attempt on the part of many conservatives to rewrite the discourse of race so as to deny its valence as a force for discrimination and exclusion either by translating it as a threat to American culture or relegating it to the language of the private sphere. The idea of race and the conditions of racism have real political effects and eliding them only makes those effects harder to recognize. And yet, the urgency to recognize how language is used to name, organize, order, and categorize matters of race not only has academic value, it also provides a location from which to engage difference and the relationship between the self and the other and between the public and private. In addition, the language of race is important because it strongly affects political and policy agendas as well. One only has to think about the effects of Charles Murray’s book, Losing Ground, on American welfare policies in the 1980s.[4] But language is more than a mode of communication or a symbolic practice that produces real effects, it is also a site of contestation and struggle. The charge that Judge Sotomayor is a racist suggests something about the changing vocabulary about race and racial injustice that has to be both critically understood and politically engaged. In fact, there is something called a new racism and it has been brilliantly explored by a number of writers including David Theo Goldberg, Elizabeth Ansell, Howard Winant, and Manning Marable, among others, though they do not use the term in the same way as conservatives. Unlike the old racism, which defined racial difference in terms of fixed biological categories organized hierarchically, the new racism operates in various guises, proclaiming among other things raceneutrality, asserting culture as a marker of racial difference, or marking race as a private matter. Unlike the crude racism with its biological referents and pseudo-scientific legitimations, buttressing