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.

The racialization of space is the subject of a huge body of literature, most recently in George Lipsitz’s (2011) How Racism Takes Place. But less has been done on the ways in which time could be racialized. Inspired by provocative treatments of the subject in writings by Michael Hanchard (1999) and Lawrie Balfour (2011), I suggest in this paper that we need to explore the workings of a “White temporal imaginary” analogous to Lipsitz’s “White spatial imaginary,” which likewise serves to protect White racial privilege from the threatening encroachments of racial justice. Using Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2003) Time Maps as a jumping-off point, I argue accordingly for the recognition of a “White time,” a “sociomental” representation of temporality shaped by the interests and experience of the White “mnemonic community.” The concept is obviously one of potentially very general usefulness, but in this essay I seek to apply it specifically to the dominant discourse on justice in political philosophy, as framed for the past forty years by John Rawls’ ([1971] 1999c) “ideal theory.” The relevance to the postracial theme of this issue is that, because of the peculiarity of philosophy as a discipline, it can claim it was always, or always-already, postracial, dealing as it ostensibly does with the (timeless) human condition as such. By making ideal theory—the normative theory of a perfectly just society—central to the conceptualization of social justice, by never exploring how radically different actual societies are from the ideal of society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” an exclusionary sociohistorical framework is established that makes the Euro-time of the West—abstracted out of the West’s relations of domination over people of color—the Greenwich Mean Time of normativity, while the alternative non-White temporality of structurally unjust societies requiring rectificatory racial justice remains a subject permanently untimely.

Considered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the “postracial epoch.” This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical conditions out of which it was produced. I explore reparations as a political language that (1) situates political claims within the historical framework of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation; (2) links past to present to future in its demand for concrete forms of redress; and (3) has played an important role in African American political life and in contemporary democracies in transition. Second, in contrast to much of the reparations scholarship, I focus on the demands of democracy rather than justice. Doing so both helps to evade some of the technical questions that have prevented full consideration of the political work of reparations and provides a vehicle for redefining both governmental and civic responsibility in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.

Through a critical engagement with Lawrence Blum’s theory of racism, I defend a “social criticism” model for the philosophical study of racism. This model relies on empirical analyses of social and psychological phenomena but goes beyond this to include the assessment of the warrant of widely held beliefs and the normative evaluation of attitudes, actions, institutions, and social arrangements. I argue that we should give political philosophy theoretical primacy over moral philosophy in normative analyses of racism. I also show how conceptualizing racism as an ideology gives us a unified account of racism and helps us to see what is truly troubling about racism, both in the past and today.

This article offers a critique of the very claim that we live in postracial times, and examines the residue of old systems of racism intermeshed with new forms of racism that perpetuate systematic institutional racism. I argue that to combat institutional racism we need post-racism rather than postracialism. Additionally, I reject the Black-white Binary as the singular or even primary paradigm for understanding racism in order to challenge narrow conceptualizations of racism. Finally, I argue for a more nuanced and complex analysis of Blackness.

In this essay we argue that the ideology of colorblind justice has made resisting the retreat from public school desegregation a hard sell in postracial America. We do not believe that desegregation is the silver bullet for solving all the problems with public education. Nor do we believe that it alone can close the racial achievement gap. Yet there is convincing evidence regarding the potential benefits of desegregation and evidence on its negative consequences is weak. Therefore we believe that it is a policy still worth pursuing. Our hope is that by casting light on the anatomy of colorblind justice and its limits we can contribute to ongoing efforts to ensure that desegregation remains in the conversation about how to address the unfinished business of racial justice.

How should we explore the relationship between race and educational opportunity? One approach to the Black-White achievement gap explores how race and class cause disparities in access and opportunity. In this paper, I consider how education contributes to the creation of race. Considering examples of classroom micropolitics, I argue that breakdowns of trust and trustworthiness between teachers and students can cause substantial disadvantages and, in the contemporary United States, this happens along racial lines. Some of the disadvantages are academic: high achievement is more difficult when one faces mistrust, ego depletion, effort pessimism, and insult. And within a knowledge economy, exclusion from knowledge work makes one vulnerable to injustice. But the problem goes deeper than achievement, for schools are contexts in which we develop self-understandings and identities that situate us as members of society. If students of color are systematically denied full participation in trusting conversations that create shared knowledge—especially, knowledge that holds power within the dominant culture—they are unjustly deprived resources to form flourishing selves that are suited to the positions of power and authority. The argument suggests that knowledge is not best understood simply as a commodity to be distributed, and opportunity is not just a matter of access. Moreover, even if access is granted, those who are motivated and talented can fail: they drain their willpower by coping with insults, or reasonably lose optimism about their efficacy. Over time, motivation may shift away from achievement, and under the circumstances this can be a rational response. The barriers to achievement are many, but true opportunity is impossible without trust and trustworthiness.

In the realm of electoral politics, a growing number of women, African Americans, and Latinos now serve at the highest levels of government. For many Americans, the bipartisan presence of representatives who are people of color and/or women is proof that we live in a “post-feminist” and “postracial” era in which institutions are now fundamentally fair and accessible. Rather than assuming that racial presence is synonymous with racial justice, this essay turns to aesthetic theory to advocate for a new understanding of presence—not as proof that racial or gender justice has been achieved but as a kind of beauty that is experienced as a form of visible certitude. Drawing on the work of Hannah Pitkin, alongside writings on descriptive representation for Latinos and African Americans, this essay stresses the importance of judgment, arguing that on questions of social justice, a racially diverse elite is simultaneously ethically valuable and politically indeterminate.

After the overthrow of Jim Crow and the reelection of our first Black president, how should we conceptualize the tasks of a racially progressive politics in the United States? I address this question through (1) the lens of recent philosophical work on the relation between narrative and the justification of political hope and (2) a comparison of two autobiographies, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn. In light of this comparison, the paper also evaluates some recent contributions to the American Political Science subfield of American Political Development.