Race after Race

HERMAN GRAY

Let's face it, the idea of postrace in the midst of one of the most racially charged and turbulent moments of the new century so far is oxymoronic — in the United States we are experiencing an epidemic loss of black life at the hands of police violence; since the 2016 presidential election cycle we have state-sanctioned voter suppression of black voters; race is at the center of intense racial suspicion, division, and resentment; no longer a fringe element in the national discourse, white racial nationalism aimed at demonizing black and LGBTQ people and at restricting Muslim, Latino, and Arab immigration with the expressed aim of mobilizing and stoking white solidarity, resentment, and identity emanates from the White House. The postracial alibi for race, that postrace signals the diminution of the impact of race in modern American civic and public life, does not hold. Against the force of race in shaping the history, imagination, social relations, and psychic life of the United States, the concept of postracial is empirically mute and analytically incapable of telling us much about the continuing and powerful role of race in the contemporary life of the republic. The "post" so readily available to journalists, politicians, and scholars from various political perspectives that sought to tame the unruliness of race instead has been overtaken, indeed overwhelmed, by "race." Race has made trouble for the post with its stubborn refusal to be transformed into a more acceptable, polite, and equitable claim on social difference, which in the postracial lingua franca the words "multicultural," "diversity," and "color blindness" came to describe. With race's unwieldy and unruly eruptions in the form of virulent white supremacy, the racial basis of mass black and brown incarceration, the concentration of wealth at the top, the magnitude of loss incurred by the financial and housing crisis, we are reminded once again of the centrality of race to the foundation of the American project. Despite the postracial claims to the contrary, we are reminded of the powerful role of race in the nature of our social relations, the assignment of value, and the distribution of rewards and vulnerability.

In this chapter, I dwell on the discursive production and capacity of the post, the conditions of possibility that produced it, and the conditions that it in turn makes possible — including the trouble race makes for the postracial. Taking into account the long historical legacy that produced the concept of race in the first place, I treat the claim to the postracial "in this time," especially the disavowal of race in the form of the commitment to color blindness and the aggressive avowal of white nationalism, as a signal about the importance of race. Built as it is around a narrative of teleological movement toward a notion of progress, the postracial narrates a future in which race is benign, if not inert. In other words, the claim to postrace is not innocent. Rather, it is an operation of power knowledge, whose arrangement produces the very racial order of things, which it claims to diminish if not eliminate. Moreover, I shall suggest that in this time of race, postrace operates through knowledge, practices, and technologies — codes and algorithms — that take hold of genomes, zip codes, and credit scores in addition to bodies, morals, manners, and norms.

Rather than attempt to settle the dispute over the postracial, I am more interested in identifying the elements that a postracial conception of the present make possible in the first place. That is, whether or not we are in a moment of history and social life in the United States that we would describe as postracial, the fact is that the term is discursively productive and as such begs to be taken seriously in terms of what makes it possible as well as what it makes possible. Do we gain analytic confidence and empirical accuracy when the term "postracial" is used to refer to something in the world? To what are we referring — a political condition, a structure of feeling, a historical period, an arrangement of time that we recognize as distinct from some other, or merely a shift from previous arrangements of resources and their social distribution based on race? Perhaps postrace is a triumph of the widely held view in scholarly communities and progressive political circles that race is a fiction, a social construction, which in effect signals the end of disputes about race.

I am not convinced that this business of race, or more likely postrace, settles the matter or that the analytic and empirical salience of race in the condition of the postracial is itself a settled matter. That said, I am interested in the role of time, temporality, and progress in relation to the condition of "the post" that marks and qualifies race in the formulation "postracial." I want to trouble the post's implicit periodization of race by replacing a singularly temporal notion of time with the concept of space-time and emphasizing the incommensurable, conflicted, incomplete ways that race continues to organize social life and to matter in many aspects of our quotidian world. That is to say, the claim to the postracial implies a temporal sense of movement from one (unfair and unequal) condition to another (fair and equal). This temporality takes on board a cultural judgment and political stake in interpreting this movement as progress, as signs that things are better racially. The idea of the postracial establishes a breach in the fabric of social history and cultural memory into which have stepped some of the most virulent forms and expressions of racism and white supremacy. That is, the postracial provides cover for cultural styles of racism where quotidian ideas of racial tolerance and inclusion thrive, where racism does not need racists and is communicated in the form of codes (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Haney Lopez 2014; S. Holland 2012; Joseph 2017). Adding the idea of space-time and emphasizing the distribution, circulation, doubling back, and simultaneity of race and its operation across time underscore the vexed, salient, and contested nature of race.

If not postrace, what then: The postracial condition? The time after race? The afterlife of race? With alternate conceptions of the space-time of race, writers like Saidiya Hartman (2007) use the idea of the afterlife of slavery to focus on the continuing impact of racial slavery in the twentieth century. Kara Keeling (2019) uses the term "queer times" to describe race and its relationship to related attachments based on location, sexuality, gender history and the conjuncture of space-time shifts, digital technologies, and mediated identities. David T. Goldberg's spatial account of the threat of race also exemplifies what a spatial analysis stands to bring to conceptions of race that complicate simple narratives of progress (Goldberg 2009; see also Wright 2015). In different ways but with careful attention to shifting and multiple conceptions of space-time conjunctures and an appreciation for simultaneity of identity, attachment, and belonging, these writers reject the easy periodization of a given time and history of race that conceives of it as bounded, temporal, finished. These writers reject both the singularity and temporal sense of race time and the artificial unities of nation time, homogeneous identities, and smooth affinities that postrace purports to organize.

Stressing the space-time dimension of race rather than the purported temporality that organizes and propels the postracial as a narrative of progress marking an end of race transfers attention to the proliferation and transformation of race as a technology of power. Rather than mark the absolute, even provisional, end of race, I read the language of the postracial for what it gathers and covers — the negotiations, disputes, conflicts, resentments, and dis-ease that race produces and the postracial reli(e)ves. Accordingly, the space-time conception of the postrace is productive — that is, it helps us see how the claim to postracial makes race, produces material effects, structures sentiment, and organizes meaning. So, with the space and time of race, I mean to call up the cultural practices and technologies (including the genome, the digital, and the code) through which race in the postrace operates and the effect it produces in the way we see, know, and feel race in our everyday experience of racial capitalism, social inequality, environmental racism, the carceral state, and the (white) cultures of resentment and grievance.

Thinking the postracial in terms of the space-time of race lines up with the shift in the nature of power knowledge that produces race and on which its practices depend and the nature of the society — in this case society of control — in which it operates. In the disciplinary society the norm, the body, the intellect, and morality are the locus for the circulation of racial meaning and racial practices in the media, public policy, interpersonal experience, and the law. According to Foucault (1977, 1990, 2007), the nature of power that operates in the society of discipline takes hold of the body and exercises discipline through subjection of the body and by way of cultural and social practices aimed to produce conformity in compliance with norms and in the name of the normal. Notions of the ideal apply as much to race as to gender, morality as to souls, sex as to sexuality. With the widely accepted liberal (in the American university at least) idea of race as a social construction, in the narrative of postrace, race exists in matters of the heart, in psychological makeup, in the market, and in our DNA. Culturally, race is expressed affectively in the form of identification and attachment and secured through policing the boundaries of difference, virtue, desire, belonging, and attachment.

In the society of control, race — its signification, practice, and effect — is embedded in the code, the metric, and the algorithm. In everything from creditworthiness to investments and assets, vulnerability to disease, and life expectancy, the population organized by race experiences the world through the differential exposure to risk, disease, life, and death. With the credit score, driver's license number, Social Security number, or online purchases in the society of control, citizen-consumers are arrayed on a grid of risk and calculation where geographic histories and tastes are calculated according to predictive models that assess, arrange, and deliver our capacities and decisions to a host of business and financial interests in our risk and purchasing power. That is to say, racial subjects are arrayed on a grid of risk and calculation where everything from genealogy to online purchases is calculated according to algorithms that assess and distribute access to life (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Foucault 2004). This is a racial logic that targets and organizes the distribution of risk according to the calculus of what you buy, who you love, how you drive, and your gene pool. In the control society, both the materiality and the meaning of race take refuge in genetics, genomics, statistical regularities, and distributions of certain genetic markers. Race also organizes and fuels the intensities of in-group belonging and out-group resentment expressed as white nationalism and nurtured in social media networks and platforms. Having abandoned its lineage to racial science (e.g., the bell curve, IQ testing, craniology), the new science of race, like capitalism, is now coded, and codified in algorithms, DNA sequencing, and statistical regularities (Nelson 2016; D. Roberts 2011).

Thinking about the postrace as a specific instantiation of the space-time of race captures what Kara Keeling (2019), Saidiya Hartman (2007), and Cedric Robinson (2000) stress about the link between race and capitalism. They suggest that the very foundation on which racial slavery was built involved, and continues to involve, metrics of risk, investment, calculation to assess profit and loss, risk and investment in human labor, the production and extraction of value, and the organization of the plantation system and its affiliated social forms of policing, capture, financialization, and banking. Thinking race through space-time enables us to see these relationships not as past (as postrace might suggest) but simultaneously, multiply, relationally in the afterlife of slavery, including the postracial.

Conditions of Possibility

What are the conditions that produced the discourse of postracial as an expression and modality of race? The space-time of the postracial includes a complex of cultural, economic, political, psychic, and social elements that taken together enable the postracial condition. So let us treat postrace as a contested site and expression of power knowledge where race is produced as a feature of disciplinary control, where the truth of the race that it produces is not the truth of race but a truth about race.

The discourse of postrace avows race (a truth of race exists at the genomic level) and disavows race (race is a social construction and remains largely a feature of the past). This truth of race appears regularly in popular culture, political discourse, and academic studies. Subjection to this truth of race (as past) appears as an acknowledgment and celebration of effective struggle for media visibility, state recognition, and the affirmation of cultural significance embodied in the great struggles for racial and ethnic equality, the hallmark of which is the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s (and their subsequent revisions in the 1970s and challenges to them in the first decade of the twenty-first century). These victories both condition and serve as evidence of the postracial condition. The pervasive language of multiculturalism and diversity celebrates social and cultural differences (that include but are not limited to race) as desirable social goals in government, colleges and universities, and corporations (Joseph 2017). The language of diversity and multiculturalism as descriptions of the postracial order of things also opened the way for powerful affective identity claims on whiteness (rather than merely white ethnicity) as a political category and white grievance as the basis from which to make claims on the state for redress for (reverse) discrimination (Mukherjee 2006b; Perlman 2016).

Not to be forgotten in the space-time of the postracial is the pivotal role of postracial race in fueling moral panics about crime, violence, Mexican and Arab immigration, and the surveillance and mass prison warehousing of black and brown bodies in the name of security and safety. These panics and the carceral state and industrial complexes they fueled also mapped onto American deindustrialization, globalization, and neoliberal forms of governance in Western liberal democracies. This commitment to neoliberalism and globalization was commandeered by the financial sector, corporations, and political conservatives aiming to minimize the state's reach in corporate financial regulation, public policies extending and protecting social entitlements, and regulatory oversight in areas like consumer and worker protections in the environment and employment. Today, this American version of neoliberalism extends the calculus of the market to all aspects of public and private life (Foucault 2004). Normative citizenship and effective governance are increasingly measured by the calculation and practice of efficiency among corporations, the state, and individuals. Self-sufficiency in private life means assuming more individual burden for shared civic and public responsibilities, including the allocation of taxes for public goods like health care, public education, and infrastructure improvements and the insulation of corporations and the wealthy from social and financial risks. Race in the space-time of the postracial also figures in the intensification of a state of permanent war, in a voluntary military staffed by people of color where US empire and military strength are projected throughout the world's hot zones.

These postracial political and cultural economies and the racialized social practices they produce, organize, and signify were amplified with the election and reelection of Barack Obama and intensified with the election of Donald Trump. The truth of race deployed by postrace is the locus of intense disputes on the very meaning of the nation, who belongs, the very meaning of human life, fairness, and equality. As a signifier, postracial race brings into sharp focus the affective impact and social articulation of psychic, social, and cultural economies where racial knowledge, racial resentment, and racial recognition serve as optics through which we experience race, including the postrace disavowal of race.

We might think of postrace as the discursive bid on a coherent account of racial disavowal — an amalgam and arrangement of social, cultural, political, economic, and geographic sensory and material circumstances that animate the idea that we are done with race (especially in the face of so much that indicates that we are far from done with race). In the face of so much evidence that race continues to matter, for race not to matter at the level of public policy, economic distribution of resources, and social relations, other things must surely matter. What things have to matter for the claim to the postracial as a condition of race to have coherence, to yield up its truth? What categories of perception and habituation are mobilized, what frames of reference and meaning are operating to make sense of postrace in the midst of the proliferation and intensification of race? What feelings give form, intuition, and a lived sense of race in the space-time of postrace, where race is disavowed?