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Racism Postrace presents postracialism as the defining racial project in the present era. Although postracialism has different histories in the US and Europe, its effects are both material and discursive in each context. In the US, "postrace" became part of the public vocabulary with the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president. In Europe, the ascent of the postracial has been less overt. Postracialism is a productive imaginary that denies racial hierarchies and places antiracism in the realm of excess. In 2010, Prospect Magazine claimed that Britain is postrace due to the high number of Black and ethnic minority senior civil servants and an allegedly colorblind economy. Apart from this explicit attempt to introduce postrace into the British political vocabulary, postracialism in Europe unfolds its power out of sight and through a different vocabulary. It is a logic that has been identified to materialize through resistances to "multiculturalism" and depoliticized diversity paradigms as well as through anti-PC rhetoric and resistances against calls for reparation for crimes committed under colonial rule. As in the US, postracialism denies the political power of race, doing so from an unmarked position.
The term "postrace" seems untranslatable to many European languages, including German. Sometimes mistranslated as Postrassismus (postracism), the lack of language points to an analytical failure to engage with race as a technology of power. It is a failure to retreat from the UNESCO-induced antiracialism that has dominated European antiracist struggles in the aftermath of Nazism...