The threat of race: reflections on racial neoliberalism, by Theo David Goldberg, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 408 pp., £20.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780631219682
In The threat of race, Goldberg discusses the historical and socio-political implications of modernity and neoliberalism for relations ‘between race and death, racial security and threat, civility and power, horror and heterogeneity’ (p. 63). Attention is especially given to the regional variations of how race evaporates on behalf of neoliberal principles, whereas whiteness and racisms continue to structure the social ordering. The book contains eight essays sketching the historical and political development of racialisation, racisms, modernity and neoliberalism in five regions of the world.
The opening argument states that as Europe during the colonial era intertwined essentially with the colonised world, race became the foundation of the ordering mechanisms of modern social arrangements. Today, although race tends to be undone in post-colonial societies, its productivity has shifted from the micro to the macro level and has become a generalised threat to geo-global interests. Race is conceived as a threat to the achievements of the enlightened European Civil Society, as race embodies the incivility of those being excluded from the web of worldly connections (p. 52). Goldberg claims that in the shadows of raceless states racisms continue to circulate in an untouchable manner because of racialised private preferences, which extend to the global scale. Processes of racialisation as descriptions of social arrangements and racisms as normative insinuations are examined according to specific spatial-historical conditions and expressions.
Concerning racial americanisation, Goldberg states that it reveals ‘the historical play between segregation and its privatizing born again expression at home and in its neo-imperializing reach’ (p. 370). On the basis of this historical development, Goldberg demonstrates impressively how the racialised preference system is privatised (for example in education) and how this effectively locates racism beyond the reach of state intervention. Racial palestinianisation is developed as a set of processes of iterative land clearance, stable settlements, moral evictions, permanent infantilisation and destruction of the ‘uncivilised Arab’. Palestinian existence is denied in form of a born-again racism in the name of biblical rights and generalised security. Goldberg also deals with racial europeanisation as the evaporation of race, stating: ‘race was buried in the rubble of Auschwitz’ (p. 156). Therefore, through this categorical erasure boundaries delimiting cultural differences and against immigration are fixed, rendering racisms invisible while cultivating European whiteness. In Latin America, despite the fact that racial mixture is promoted, this continent is marked by processes of racialisation such as raceless racism and euro-mimesis aligning whiteness to social welfare privileges. Blackness is thus excluded from neoliberal achievements.
In contrast to the previous chapters in racial southafricanisation, Goldberg focuses more on the historical and empirical development of this specific racial regime. He shows convincingly how through colonialism, missionary activities, segregation and apartheid, race became sacral in the conviction of a political theology of race. Under apartheid the social construction of race in absolute terms peaks, forging universal definitions through race. Goldberg sheds light on the consequences of these processes in the present. Today racism is negated and race is ‘neoliberalized’ as sovereignty is displaced from the state to the realm of the economic.
In the last chapter Goldberg develops the idea of racial neoliberalism defining neoliberalism as ‘the intensification of privatized preference and experience […] the hyper-extenuation of the neo-liberal [as] its decoupling from any conscious modesty of humility, from any finitude’ (p. 362). Under such a regime, varying according to the five regions discussed, racial neoliberalism entails the privatising of institutionalised racisms through the protection of the private sphere from any state incursions. Therefore, following Goldberg's argument, the state no longer intervenes against racisms since such intervention is perceived as limiting the freedom and equality of individuals in the private sphere. The author succeeds in convincing the reader that the privatising of race entails also that racisms are privatised and that they circulate freely in privacy in the form of racist informalisms and individualisation. Affirmative actions and other anti-discriminatory public interventions become obsolete.
This book meticulously overviews the different historical and current processes of racialisation and its interdependence with modernity, the rise of neoliberalism and the war on terror. In the chapters about racial americanisation and southafricanisation, Goldberg impressively locates these different processes within crucial historical moments and follows through their continuity in the present. With this book he contributes to further our understanding of how race operates as a threat to neoliberal interests on a global scale during the history of modernity and in the context of raceless states today.
However, due to its essayist writing style, in the analysis of local examples from South America, Europe and Palestine, the reader is often required to believe certain of Goldberg's empirical developments in the absence of sufficient evidence. For instance, he analyses the results of a Swiss poll in 2008, framing its outcome as the denial of the existence of 20% of coloured people. However there is no mention of the fact that this percentage represents the category of non-nationals (foreigners), not all of whom are people ‘of colour’. While Goldberg contributes greatly to addressing the normative and philosophical debate about race in our times, some empirical examples nonetheless tend to remain anecdotal. Some of the contextual developments should therefore be considered more as explorations of specific themes rather than established analyses derived from empirical evidence.