ARC executive director Rinku Sen authored a piece in On the Issues Magazine about postracialism, and why it resists racial equity standards.

Here are some excerpts:

"Postracialism grows out of the trope of colorblindness, but is even more aggressive in resisting racial justice standards. Like post-feminist, it implies not just a destination – a society that doesn’t use race to judge people - but asserts that we have arrived at that place. Postracialists are more hostile to changing structures and rules to address persistent racial disparities, which appear nowhere in the “postracial” story."

The mythology of postracialism, like colorblindness, is terribly difficult to counter because it is so intuitive and aspirational. It makes sense at a gut level that if people endure hardship because of their racial identities, canceling out the importance of those identities solves the problem. What better marker of progress could there be than a black President? The ease with which Americans adopted this frame certainly points to a deficit in the body politic - its inability to acknowledge the depth of the racial gap and its true causes. But, to complicate matters, it also speaks to Americans’ positive desire to not be racist. The first works against us. The latter, however cynically we might view it, provides an opening that we have to take to expand the constituency of people who will act for racial justice.

>>Read the entire piece here.