ABSTRACT
After the transparency of modern racial power in the US suffered a crisis of legitimacy, Jim Crow racism was replaced by a new regime of speech act commonly referred to as colorblindness or symbolic racism. As a postmodern performative, colorblindness signaled a shift away from overt references to the matter of race toward coded and apparently race-neutral discourse, all the while contradicted by explicit racialized practices and outcomes. With the recent global changes sparked by white nativism and forms of white nationalist fervor in the US (and the UK, France, Sweden, Germany, Australia to name other white majority nations), we are witnessing another shift in public race discourse. Post-colorblindness in the US is borne of a condition that is overtly racial but maintains important distinctions from the legally sanctioned arrangements of Jim Crow. In post-colorblind speech, whiteness attempts to construct itself as just another racial experience (even victims of racism); that is, whiteness is not superior to minority groups but arguably a minority and marginalized group in its own right. It organizes via distributed networks of control societies, producing echo chambers of algorithmically sedimented views of the world. We propose that an educational philosophy that takes racialized speech acts seriously is the key if both education and philosophy are to insist on their ability to intervene in the problems found in social relations, like race. In distributed societies, these reconfigured speech acts are not only from human actors but also via the more-than-human performative acts of algorithms. Educational philosophy finds itself embedded in a new racial condition marked by the new articulation among whiteness, populist authoritarianism, and the more-than-human racialized speech acts within the public sphere. Captured in the images of celebratory marches by white nationalist groups, heard in the chants extolling white identity politics, and witnessed in the formed extremism from the algorithmically produced racialized search results of google (e.g. Dylann Roof), post-colorblindness problematically ushers in a new era of racialized speech acts that assert whiteness as having equal status with other racial groups, on some level symmetrical with the claims of minority groups’ claims for recognition.
