Rhyme and Reason
Rhyme and Reason
“Post-Race” and the Politics of Colorblind Racism
This chapter looks at the evolution of the term “post-racial” and traces the discursive and rhetorical career of the term “colorblindness” to demonstrate how the conservative Right's appropriation of the ideology of colorblindness led to an embrace of a post-racial ideology. Embracing this postracial ideology in turn enables a nationwide racial apathy and leads to problematic policies and politicized rhetoric. Barack Obama's epochal significance took shape as the culmination of post-racial ideas: the farcical denouement of colorblindness as universal paean of the U.S. racial narrative. Against staggering evidence of abiding, and indeed deepening, ethnoracial inequalities impacting education, income and wealth, housing, health care, voting, and incarceration, the Obama moment organizes the “truth,” however improbable, of a new America in which race has become the difference that makes no difference at all.
Keywords: post-racial ideology, colorblindness, conservative Right, racial apathy, Barack Obama, U.S. racial narrative, race, ethnoracial inequalities
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