The Threat of Race

This essay is an extended response to five reviews of The Threat of Race contributed by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Susan Giroux, Kelly Gillespie, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Peter Wade. Issues discussed range over the sadistic elements of racism’s characteristic violence, the ‘disappearance’ or ‘invisibility’ of race and the impact on racisms, the distinction and relation between naturalism and historicism in racial articulation, and the connection to biologism and culturalism, racial epistemologies, racial coloniality and racial neoliberalism. The central theme of the book, the notion of racial neoliberalism, is elaborated and exemplified by reference to the characterization of Obama by some since he was elected president of the United States.

This essay appeared in the Feburary 2010 issue of Patters of Prejudice. 

Susan Searls Giroux: Sade’s revenge: racial neoliberalism and the sovereignty of negation
Nadia Abu El-Haj: Racial palestinianization and the Janus-faced nature of the Israeli state
Peter Wade: The presence and absence of race 
Kelly Gillespie: Reclaiming nonracialism: reading The Threat of Race from South Africa 
Nelson Maldonado-Torres: The time and space of race: reflections on David Theo Goldberg’s interrelational and comparative methodology
David Theo Goldberg: Call and response 

Read more »

Barack Obama’s candidacy for the American Presidency has proved that racism in America is pretty much a thing of the past. Whether or not he wins, a black man has broken the barrier of racism in American politics. His candidacy has proven how inconsequential racism has become in a land long scarred by it. If a black man can rise to the nation’s highest office and can occupy the most powerful position in the world, racism can be no more than the sometime pernicious, occasionally violent but decidedly intermittent expressions of misguided individuals. The deep commitment to freedom of expression means that the country will just have to put up with these anomalies. It is the price to be paid for America’s unstinting commitment to liberty.

Read more »

Two competing historical frames have marked thinking about race and the conceptualization of racism.

A dominant view among academic commentators takes racism to acquire its explicit modern expression only from the nineteenth century onwards.  Advocates may acknowledge that a notion of race appears in literature and popular expression increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  But they deny that such expression amounts to the sort of explicit, sustained, and elaborated mode of racist expression so widely circulated in the nineteenth century.

Read more »

The Royal Belgium Museum for Central Africa (known in short as the Tervuren Museum after its location at the countryside edge of Brussels) has a century long history, about which I write critically in the pages of The Threat of Race (see pp. 169-75). Those pages are predicated on the basis of a visit to the Museum, its accompanying catalogs and commentary prior to 2005, when the Museum leadership began to rethink the design and representation of the institution in the wake of growing vocal criticism both locally, especially from Congolese Belgians, and internationally.

Read more »