David Theo Goldberg

The new segregation

Abstract I argue that there has emerged since the 1960s new forms of racial segregation in the United States. Placing this claim in context of earlier historical shifts in the manifestation of segregation—the north-south segregation of post-Reconstruction, the dramatic urban neighborhood segregation emerging in the first half of the twentieth century—I map out both the character and effects of this segregation, and the political, economic, and sociocultural conditions that combine to produce it. Thus while the old segregation was “activist” and for the most part monolithic, the new segregation is “conservationist,” preference driven, and class differentiated. I suggest that a new form of segregation has emerged also, and outline the contours of this ideological representation.

The semantics of race

Abstract I argue that the concept of race assumes specific meanings relative to prevailing historical conditions and discourses in given societies. In analysing these changes in significance, I focus on contemporary cultural conceptions of race. Here, I argue against the prevailing wisdom, that racial reference does not necessarily invoke underlying biological reference. From this I derive a general conception of race as virtually vacuous, reflective of dominant social discourses, forging self‐ and other‐ascriptive identities of anonymity, but at the same time defining inclusions and exclusions in respect of the body politic. The transformations in the spatio‐temporal significance of race reveal the concept to be an inherently political one, assuming significance as it orders membership in and exclusions from the body politic. I conclude by indicating some implications of the analysis for resisting a racialized status quo.

Cloning cultures: the social injustices of sameness

Cloning is widely considered only to be a biological discourse. Few, however, have paid attention to the cultural contexts that have made cloning conceivable. The relation between the biological and cultural considerations of cloning are revealed by the anxieties conjured up by the prospects of cloning human beings. By cloning we understand the reproduction of sameness which is deeply ingrained in the organization and reproduction of culture. The ease with which cloning has been taken up in contemporary thinking has been made possible by the widespread saturation of the normative assumption of socio-cultural sameness underpinning much of mainstream modern thinking around politics, law, education, management, aesthetics, the military and processes of production. We consider the cultural considerations regarding the reproduction of sameness and the implications of cloning for issues of social injustice.

Racial comparisons, relational racisms: some thoughts on method

Abstract The dominant method in studies of race and racism across different geographic and temporal instances has been comparative. This, I suggest, has been predicated on a set of assumptions about the discreteness of the instances. By contrast, I argue that comparativism misses deeper and larger issues about the workings of race and racism fuelled by the relations between racial configuration and racist conditions across times and places. I trace the varying methodological modalities of comparativism and relationality in the study of race and racisms, their contributions and shortcomings, contrasts and connections.

Modernity, Race, and Morality

the subject involves, in large part, thinking (of) oneself in terms of-literally as-the image projected in prevailing concepts of the discursive order. These concepts incorporate norms of behavior, rules of interaction, and principles of social organization. The values inherent in these norms, rules, and principles exercise themselves upon individual and social being as they are assumed, molded, indeed sometimes transformed in their individual and social articulation.

Racism and Rationality: The Need for a New Critique

Two classes of argument, logical and moral, are usually offered for the general assumption that racism is inherently irrational. The logical arguments involve accusations concerning stereotyping (category mistakes and empirical errors resulting from overgeneralization) as well as inconsistencies between attitudes and behavior and inconsistencies in beliefs. Moral arguments claim that racism fails as means to well-defined ends, or that racist acts achieve ends other than moral ones. Based on a rationality-neutral definition of racism, it is argued in this article that none of these arguments establish exhaustively that racism is inherently irrational. Ways are suggested to proceed in condemning racism(s) as morally and socially unacceptable, independent of the irrationality claim.