The “Post-national” Racial State, Domestication, and Multiscalar Organizing in the New Millennium

Our book concludes with an exploration of national politics, structural antagonisms, and racial justice via transnational, indigenous, and women of color feminist perspectives. It also puts the black/white racial binary that has animated the rest of the book into a broader racial perspective. Kirstie A. Dorr introduces a set of case studies that signal some of the thorny polemics that complicate and confound the pursuit of racial justice as a solely nation-based project. This chapter concludes that, in our current political moment, analyses of racial discourse and practice must contend with the ways in which racial formation processes are at once geo-historically specific—that is, as temporally emplaced in particular, local, regional, and national contexts—and geo-historically relational—that is, as situated within and articulated with other geographies of racial capitalist formation and networks of cultural circulation.

Introduction

The introduction discusses how racial reconciliation has been thought about from Brown’s integrationist vision to imaginings of post-racialism that accompanied the election of Barack Obama. We ask what we can learn about the conditions of racial reconciliation by examining that history. This chapter also provides an overview of the subsequent chapters in this book, showing how each helps illuminate the conditions that impede racial reconciliation and those that might facilitate it in the future.

Black Deaths Matter, Too

Valerie C. Cooper’s chapter takes up the events of June 2015, when a white supremacist gunman entered a historically black church, Emanuel AME, in Charleston, South Carolina, and after sitting with the parishioners for some time during a Bible study, opened fire, killing nine blacks, including the pastor of the church. The incident precipitated a re-evaluation of racial relations in Charleston and around the United States. This chapter explores the difficulties in bridging the racial divide between black and white churches in America by focusing upon Americans’ reactions to the deaths at Emanuel. Black and white Christians’ responses to the massacre at Emanuel demonstrate, Cooper concludes, that believers’ views of history and their personal experiences matter as much or perhaps more than their theology in efforts at racial reconciliation.

Racial Fakery and the Next Postracial

The first chapter acknowledges that structures matter. Matthew Pratt Guterl discusses the practice of racial passing in the supposed post-racial age, dwelling on what it tells us about structures—and about racial reconciliation. Guterl takes up the story of Rachel Dolezal—with the benefit of a year’s reflection—and her “trans-racial” subject position. He reads it, as she did, through the experiences of Caitlyn Jenner, the trans-gender sports figure. He asks what it means to celebrate racial self-fashioning as if it were akin to gender transitioning and thinks about the broader cultural responses to Dolezal’s story of passing and subterfuge.

Weaponized Empathy

This chapter traces the history of calls for “racial reconciliation” in policing and, in so doing, identifies the potential pitfalls of current reform efforts. New proposals for “racial reconciliation” fit within an old architecture of policing reform, extending from the pursuit of stable police “race relations” in the 1950s, to healthy “police-community relations” in the late 1960s, and to proactive “community-oriented policing” of the 1990s. Tracing this post–civil rights history of racial reconciliation in policing, Naomi Murakawa identifies potential dangers that lurk within well-intentioned efforts to reconcile police and black communities through truth-telling forums and procedural justice. Murakawa concludes that the language of “racial reconciliation” demands reform but resists normative commitments, effectively translating the potentially transformative work of Black Lives Matter into a set of technocratic, proceduralist fixes with an air of emotional sensitivity.

Race and Science

The next chapter continues the work of thinking from the level of individuals to the conditions of racial reconciliation. It argues that many of the racial antagonisms that existed in the United States from slavery up through the end of World War II were based largely upon a singular idea: biological race, or the notion that social categories of race reflect inherent group differences. Osagie K. Obasogie argues that the continued skepticism toward, and resistance to, social constructionist understandings of race in scientific and medical research serves as a primary barrier to racial reconciliation. Until science and medicine move away from the idea that human difference, disease patterns, and disparate social and health outcomes lay in molecular or other physiological distinctions and take seriously the ideological origins and import of race, no meaningful racial healing can take place.

From Perceiving Injustice to Achieving Racial Justice

In Chapter 3 Carla Shedd focuses on individuals who act as brokers in urban institutions. She notes that there is a symbiotic relationship among urban neighborhoods, public education, and criminal justice. In the name of justice, and often in the name of protecting America’s most vulnerable residents, the nurturing arm of the state, she says, now looks more like the punishing arm of the state. It is critical, Shedd contends, that we empirically trace the long reach of the justice system, its links with central social institutions, and the identities/attributes of key racial agents in order to put our public systems back on track to fulfill their stated missions.