Much contemporary antiracist and African Americanist scholarship – especially since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama – has assumed a decidedly cynical orientation toward ideas of “post-racialism.” Scholars, journalists, and activists have rightly detected, in numerous deployments of the term, a kind of bad faith utopianism espoused as a cover for political retreat from progressive, race-conscious policies. This chapter recognizes the merits of such anti-post-racial critiques, but also argues against the summary dismissal of the term. More pointedly, the chapter argues for a rethinking of post-racialism that acknowledges and grapples with a long, ideologically heterogeneous history of African American investments in and ambivalence toward the race concept. The upshot of this rethinking is not a defense of post-racialism as such, but a richer and more dynamic portrait of post-racialism’s historical force, social currency, and inner workings. The chapter takes inspiration from, and proceeds through close readings and intertextual analyses of, Danzy Senna’s 2017 novel, New People.

Chapter 4 examines state, federal and other studies that have documented how African Americans were particularly targeted for predatory and subprime lending, even when they qualified for traditional mortgages. It examines the historical links between racism and limited access to traditional mortgage lenders, and how this historical treatment fostered the subprime market. This chapter also explores the critically important question of why African Americans were targeted. No other community was targeted as aggressively as were black Americans. The chapter concludes with a discussion of continued victimization, and why African Americans harmed by predatory lending are not getting the help they need to begin to recover from the wealth drain that has damaged individuals, families, and entire communities.

The conclusion traces the evolution of blackness in Mexico—its spatial orientations, histories, and relationships to culture, society, and the black body—from 1968 to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography’s 2015 intercensal survey, the first state-sponsored recognition of the nation’s visible African-descended population for the first time since independence. It examines the competing diasporic authenticities that have developed in the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca on the one hand and in the state of Veracruz on the other since the 1980s. In broad terms, the conclusion uses the transnational histories detailed throughout Finding Afro-Mexico to examine recent debates about the legacies of the long 1960s, ‘post-racial’ societies, Afro-diasporic methodologies, and the politics of racial comparison in Western Hemisphere.