Sociologies (May 2019)
Post-racialisme, déni du racisme et crise de la blanchité
Abstract
Focussing on the postracial drive to undermine racism through its purported universalization, the paper is aimed at analyzing, from a critical race studies perspective, how the ‘racial eliminativist’ demands, that underlie postracialist projects, paradoxically, crystallize into new forms of racial deniability, which I study through the contemporary expressions of ‘not racism’. Thus the argument is not about the existence of race as a factor determining social and political relations, hence ‘anti-racialism’, but rather about the establishment of definitions of racism that either sideline or deny race both as an historical phenomenon and as experienced by racialised people, on the one hand ; push for a dominant interpretation of racism as a moral one which sutures it to assessments of individual character, on the other hand. Three key facets of this ‘not racism’ will be put under scrutiny : the tendency to oppose race and class ; the alleged ‘unhelpfulness’ of racism; and the so called ‘elitism’ of antiracism.
