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TAKING POSTRACIALISM SERIOUSLY

From Movement Mythology to Racial Formation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2014

Paul C. Taylor
Paul C. Taylor*
Affiliation:
Department of African American Studies and Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University
*
Corresponding author: Paul C. Taylor, Department of African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 133 Willard Building, State College, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay reconsiders the prospects for postracialist discourse. Critics tend not to take seriously enough the strongest case that can be made for viewing contemporary U.S. racial politics through the postracial lens. As a result, some important criticisms—the ones that survive postracialism’s reformulation in these stronger terms—have yet to be fully developed. It is important to develop a critique of the strongest form of postracialism, because this form of the view shares, or exemplifies, certain problems in garden-variety liberal antiracisms. Clarifying these problems in the more extreme conceptual environment of postracialism may help clarify their implications for the much more widespread commitments of mainstream post-civil rights thinking.

Keywords

PostracialismRacismRace TheoryRacial FormationRaceAnti-racismCivil Rights Movement
Type
Race in a “Postracial” Epoch
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Spring 2014 , pp. 9 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2014 

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