ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that how it is possible for extreme racial inequality to exist side by side with increasing racial civic inclusion in the neoliberal era. In order to answer this question, the chapter starts with the history of systemic racism and citizenship. The splintering and then subsequent reassembling of difference along lines of good and bad citizenship make systemic racism and diversity compatible in the neoliberal era. In addition to the economic dimension of property ownership, the cultural aspects of early American good citizenship included linking enlightenment values of freedom and liberty with bourgeois values of decency and civility. The civil rights movement targeted the normative meanings behind who counted as a good citizen in order to change what counts as good citizenship. Since American citizenship was always racialized as white, blacks had to deracialize citizenship. The ascendance of a new white elite accompanied a new representation of good white citizenship that ushered in the era of neoliberalism.
