Blackness and the African Diaspora in ‘Postracial’ America

Résumé 0

Attempts at challenging the American racial order have not necessarily succeeded in bringing about an era when blackness and whiteness as racialized identities do not play such a major role in shaping Americans’ lives—an era that can be equated to a postracial one. However, acts of resistance have led to an increasing destabilization of that order. To assess that level of destabilization, we will first look at attacks against the racial order on the part of activists of the Black Freedom Struggle, and the new generation of black politicians as well, and question whether the racial hierarchy has had a lessening importance in today’s sociopolitical realm. Then we will focus on groups that stand at the periphery, because their racial identity is perceived as somewhat ambivalent, namely multiracials and immigrants of the black African diaspora, to see whether they can resist compliance with the existing racial hierarchy. Then we will assess the reality of the decentering of the racial order in contemporary America, using public opinion data on race, racism and racial equality, and focusing on the opinion of Americans—black American youth in particular— along racial lines. In these so-called postracial times when American voters have chosen a biracial president twice, when demographic and immigration trends are evolving at such a fast rate that the nation is not seen as ‘black and white’ anymore, and identities are increasingly recognized as inherently hybrid, to what extent has the American racial order been ‘destabilize[d], decenter[ed] and carnivaliz[ed]’ (Mercer 1988: 57)?