Racism Postrace ed. by Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray (review)

Racism Postrace: the title of this timely volume succinctly captures the new paradox into which our culture's old, pathological obsession with race has thrust us in the new millennium. The ubiquitous yet premature declaration that we have transcended race—at its highest pitch upon the election of Barack Obama—has thrown open the floodgates, unleashing a new generation of gnarly contradictions and fresh forms of oppression. It is to precisely these varied consequences of our postrace dispensation that Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray's edited collection addresses itself. The collection joins an expanding chorus of 2010s studies seeking to vanquish the Pollyannaish notion that this nation has outgrown race—among them, Kimberly Jade Norwood's edited collection Color Matters: Skin Tone Bias and the Myth of a Postracial America, Paul C. Taylor's recent book On Obama (Thinking in Action) (2015) and his important essays on postracialism, and, of course, the authoritative study by Catherine R. Squires (who contributes the volume's epilogue), The Post-Racial Mystique (2014). What distinguishes Racism Postrace is its focus on the multifarious kinds of oppression that assertions of a postracial order abet. For the editors of this collection and most of its contributors, the point is not simply that the U.S. is not postracial; no, perhaps far worse, it's that the pervasive delusion that race no longer matters has enabled racism to adapt to a new age and proliferate with all the gusto of a smallpox strain in a colony of anti-vaxxers.

How does a prejudice, such as racism, survive, much less thrive, once its target is discursively conjured out of existence? Gathered here is an impressively diverse array of responses to this quandary, from contributors of various disciplines, although most practice in the omnivorous scholarly enclave known as "cultural studies" (as the sundry kinds of evidence marshaled here readily make plain). Common among almost all the contributors is an interest in mass-cultural artifacts—mainstream radio, web-based, or television shows; popular music and sports; cosmetic products and fashion. Notably, not a single literary critic or art historian has been admitted into the symposium, a feature so conspicuous in such a multifaceted volume that, though unremarked, must be intentional. Are we meant to infer that literature and the visual arts no longer command the audiences necessary for an appreciable impact on postracial discourse? On this question, the editors are silent, and perhaps, finally, that is a canny decision, an eschewal of a potentially distracting fight. In any event, taken together, the essays comprising this volume certainly make the case that postracial thinking pervades popular culture, to the point where one can no more avoid it than keep dry in the rain. Each entry demonstrates in its own way that denials of the relevance of race have the paradoxical, perhaps even perverse, effect of generating new forms of racism—a notion captured in Herman Gray's epigrammatic assertion that "the claim to postrace is not innocent" (24). On the other hand, as we shall see, this grim picture of our society is brightened by some of the contributors' incisive attention to the empowering aspects of the postracial order, to the emancipatory improvisations with postracial thinking that have emerged in the first two decades of the new millennium.

Composed of thirteen standalone essays, Racism Postrace is a rewarding but very long book. It is divided into two parts. The first, titled "Assumptions," takes inventory of some of the most important implications ensuing from claims that we have outgrown race. Most of the essays in this section take the next step of exposing the uses to which these claims have been put. The second part, "Performances," offers a series of case studies of postracial thinking in action, showing how postracial logic has shaped mass entertainment. Deepened by the grand narratives of...