Editorial: Post-racial Imaginaries – connecting the pieces

In the deluge of the ‘posts’ that have littered the critical scene over the last three decades, ‘post-race’ has arrived quite late in the day. After the endless sparring over the meanings of the ‘post’, the ‘post’ in post-race seems already politically inadequate and theoretically dated. But perhaps its untimeliness is an opening up of a critical space to rethink race and racism in contemporary thought and politics?

It’s emphatic that the post-racial should not mean ‘post-racist’ – in fact most committed anti-racists have tended to dismiss the term as problematic to the contemporary struggles for racial justice. Even with liberal commentators there is a recognition of the continual presence of racism, though its overcoming is only a matter of time for them. Nonetheless, for those with a more radical anti-racist persuasion, if it is not about an overcoming of racism then why is the post-race concept to be invoked at all, given that it appears to signify that we have moved beyond race and racism in some way or another?