Postracial. Seriously, just stop.
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Damn it, you're spoiling all the fun. Can I still be post-white?
Yes. Yes you can.
Personally, I go for "rootless cosmopolitan" for myself, which has a certain Stalinist flair, and has the advantage of sounding like a drink that comes with an umbrella in it.
white we're at it, can we get rid of "cratering"?
I prefer to focus on pre-racial. It hearkens back to a simpler time when we were all just single-celled organism floating around the oceans. That is until a few uppity amoebas divided into two cells, crawled out of the oceans, invented lattes and founded both Harvard and the New York Times.
All I want to be is post-election.
KevDog wins the thread.
Racialicious has a nice post on the topic up.
My last comment got caught in the filter, and held for approval. Really curious what caused that...
Postsexual. No wait, that doesn't sound very fun.
Postracial? Postracial?!? All this time I thought I was hearing "most-racial". Barack Obama is a most-racial candidate. This election could usher in a most-racial era.
Postracial? What does that even mean?
On this topic, did folks see the article in WaPo about so-called postracial campaign staffers at Obama offices? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR2008102904554.html?referrer=emailarticle)
Ms. Stewart's experience in this article reflects what I've seen volunteering at various Obama offices throughout primary states. Young, twerpy campaign staffers just a little too flippant about "that all-black neighborhood, its REALLY ghetto, i need you to do all the hispanic doors..." etc. etc. Canvassing in the Philly projects, me and my homegirl almost got shot at on one block cuz they sent us in a random area, there was no local knowledge on the part of campaign staffers. My African-American friend was 6 months pregnant. Now, we're from Tha Town so not easily rattled... but the naivete mixed with demographic slicing & dicing along racial lines of the Obama-ites just made me feel weird. Plus that whole word "post-racial."
I am curious how this will manifest after the election. Will this victory mean the same to all of us? Should it? Should I just chalk it up to cultural differences and forget about it?
Amen. Along similar rhetorical lines, I'm curious what your thoughts are on African American versus black. I personally hope the former goes the way of Negro, as I don't consider myself more "regular" American than my black compatriots, and I think the term has lost its original meaning.
Side story to prove my point: When studying abroad in Italy, another student had his laptop stolen (by a drug dealer he had let into his apartment, but that's a whole other story). When one of his roommates found out that it had been stolen, he started ranting about "what did the guy look like? was he an AFRICAN AMERICAN?"
Only if we get rid of "reverse racism" first.
You is just a racialist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpDyJObCKOY
I'm actually in favor of banning all "post-" terms. In roughly 96% of occurrences of usage of a "post-" term, the writer/speaker is being unknowingly intellectually lazy/stupid, yet at the same time incredibly snobby. Moreover, they're usually substituting the "post-" term for another concept with a divergent (or even nonexistent) meaning
Examples:
Post-modernism -> Relatavism instead of art & philosophy that critiques, but works within modernism.
Post-feminist -> Anti-feminism instead of third-wave feminism that questions gender binaries and essetialism.
Post-racial -> A regurgitation of liberal kumbaya shit with no real meaning.
Post-human -> Substituted for lolnerd or Haraway's 'cyborg.' No idea as to whether it has an actual, substantial agreed-upon meaning.
YES IZ HAF 2 MUCH COFEE THIS MORNIN AND IZ HAF MANIK SUPEREROTY COMPLECKS
Damn,
Ben beat me to it. I agree though all post terms should be banned.
Post-Feminist Post-structuralist, Post-Marxist, etc.
While we are on the subject I had a professor tell me that she thought we were living in a post-literate society. I really wanted to ask her "What comes after literacy? Ignorance and Superstition?" for the sake of my grade however I demurred.
Kevdog had it right. All of us really just want to be Post-election, and pre-paring for an Obama Presidency.
While post-post-racialism does have it's appeal, I've moved on to post-post-post-racialism.
Can I still listen to post-rock?
What about "going post-al"? Is that still okay?
And no more post-er children, either?
Can we still work on becoming a "post-prejudice" society, or is that just too Utopian?
Postracial implies "it's done," which is impossible, literally. Think about it in comparison to a term like "post-vasectomy" and you catch my drift...
There you go, going postal on us again. Two days in a row. Least there's no violence today.
Which means we may be slightly more genetically more mixed then we used to be, but we've got our heads on straighter.
I move that we start calling bars Post-Offices because that's what you do post-office go to the bar.
Hopefully we get to a point where we have a proportionately large black middle class to be post-racial. We're not there yet. The symbolism of an Obama victory will help. But, racism was baked into the Constitution and will take a few maybe several generations to diminish its relevance.
I consider myself multicultural. I have a very large, close black family 13 branches at my grandmothers level but went to all white highschool and am a black minority in a majority white industry. My culture shock came in highschool. I used to think all white people were rich. Once we get past the racial we can hopefully enjoy the cultural diversity not just between black and white but within black and white and other cultures as well. There's wisdom in all of them.
In graduate school, I read Thomas Sowell's The Economics of Race (He wrote it before he became a conservative hack I think) and it opened my eyes to the misnomer of white and black culture. Each of the immigrants bring a different history and culture and experience to this experiment. Germans and Scotch Irish have a different idea about the strength of central government. Jamaicans were always the majority. American blacks have always been the minority. Race oversimplifies all this.
I don't know, I guess I'm the minority on this thread, but I don't want to get rid of 'post-racial'. Look, it's a clunky term and mildly offensive to non-white people, so as a white guy I'll try not to use it. But I actually think that 'post-racial' is a great description of the attitude that most people (especially white people) in this country need to strive for. Clearly we are never AS A SOCIETY going to become 'post-racial', as many people have pointed out that is impossible. But individual people can certainly be post-racial, if they simply do not notice people's race in their dealings with them. Maybe that seems impossible too, but for my younger brothers and sister it seems to be a reality. My sister is 17, goes (and this is a big key) to a diverse high school, and hangs out with kids of every stripe and skin color. She often talks to me about how she doesn't understand racism, not how people could be racist, she doesn't really understand the concept. Yes she's incredibly naive, but then again, she has as many black and latino and asian friends as she has white friends, so maybe she knows something I don't.
I resist the idea that 'post-racial' is meaningless because I feel we've come most of the way that we can go in our society in terms of legislating equality. There are still steps we can take, but there exists a point of diminishing returns, and it's become crystal clear that legislating people's individual choices re: race does nothing except backfire. In this context, I can't help but think that 'post-racial' is the best shot we (the royal we, but focusing on white people) have for escaping the label 'racist'. That's why I'm not willing to give up on it, and I'd like to hear what some of these commenters, or even TNC himself, think should replace "post-racial" as a term for the racial and integrative goals of American society.
I just want to correct my post: I read Sowell's Race and Economics, not The Economics of Race.
I was about to post when OGWiseman took the words right out of my mouth. I also think that "postracial" is an ideal worth shooting for. Clearly its not the dominant reality. But I wonder what the objection to the term rests on? Is it that it doesn't reflect reality--that is suggests that race isn't an issue anymore and we're done with racism, when that obviously isn't the case? That I can understand. But I also wonder if the idea of the post-racial is threatening to institutions and people that are heavily invested in racial identity and identity politics, despite (or because of?) the fact that this racial identity was originally externally imposed and all tied up in oppression.