D T Goldberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 12932 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D T Goldberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | D T |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldberg |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDBERG D T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9935-0411 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 619 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Mission failure: Too much is never enough
The dread of dread
Meta-racial conditions: On the limits of racial pessimism
“Racial pessimism” is the set of views that “antiblackness” is uniquely an excess of racism, universal, univocal, and unavoidable in its formation and reach. Rei Terada’s recent book, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness and Political Identity, is an undertaking to provide a critical philosophical grounding to the claim of racial pessimism. Key to her argument is that core enlightenment and post-enlightenment commitments to equality, anti-essentialis…
Beyond a world of dread: A conversation with David Theo Goldberg
The War on Critical Race Theory
Philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff, whose earlier work tracked the history of anti-Semitism, indicts contemporary anti-racist critics of the French state as guilty of “anti-white racism.” An assistant attorney general in Australia insisted an anti-racism program should not be funded because “taxpayer funds” were being used “to promote critical race theory”. Like “diversity” over the past decade and “multiculturalism” before that, critical race the…
Moving Up, Moving Out: The Rise of the Black Middle Class in Chicago
In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) William Julius Wilson posited that Black middle-class abandonment and a corresponding lack of “role models” was, in part, responsible for urban poverty and the proliferation of an African American “underclass.” In Moving Up, Moving Out, Will Cooley forcefully challenges this notion, arguing that attempts to saddle the Black middle class with the blame and responsibility for urban poverty obscures its racial and e…
Racial Knowledge
Racial knowledge consists ex hypothesis in the making of difference; it is in a sense and paradoxically the assumption and paradigmatic establishment of difference. At the same time, racial knowledge racial science, to risk excess is able to do this because it has been historically integral to the emergence of these authoritative scientific fields. An epistemology so basically driven by difference will &s;naturally&s; find racialized thinking com…
Coding Time
This article analyzes the various ways algorithmic logic structures, streamlines, and delimits the conception of time and memory; orders the logics of social arrangement; and delimits the political. The author considers the ways in which algorithms extend racial discrimination, rendering it less visible, less discernible, and so more difficult to address. He briefly formulates a notion of crypto-value embedded within algorithmic self-conception a…
The Reason of Unreason: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg in conversation about Critique of Black Reason
David Theo Goldberg engages Achille Mbembe in a wide-ranging conversation on the key lines of analysis of Mbembe's book, The Critique of Black Reason. The discussion ranges across a broad swath of key themes: the constitutive feature of racisms in the making of modernity and modern capitalism as conceived through the global black experience; the African and French archives in constituting, resisting, and refashioning 'black reason' and its multip…
Militarizing Race
Against the historical background of the transitions between religion and race, of race as the secularization of the religious, this article traces the ways race operates in the conduct of social struggles, wars, and warring in the making and refashioning of racial conception. This militarizing of society that has constitutively marked modern state formation shapes social disciplining of individuals and the regulation of social structures. The ar…
Vanishing points: Reflecting on My Respondents
The six reviewers all offer critically insightful readings of Are we all post-racial yet? In so doing, they identify aporias and pauses in the arguments of the book, signalling compelling lines of
Racial comparisons, relational racisms: Some thoughts on method
The prevailing academic paradigm in analyzing race and racism, ethnic and racial relations, has been comparative. Analysts contrast and compare different societies, historically or contemporarily, to reveal similarities and differences regarding popular ethnoracial expression as well as state formulations, structures and responses. In this chapter, I suggest that this dominant paradigm overlooks a more compelling mode of critical analysis regardi…
Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives
How have research agendas on race and ethnic relations changed over the past two decades and what new developments have emerged? Theories of Race and Ethnicity provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge collection of theoretically grounded and empirically informed essays. It covers a range of key issues in race and ethnicity studies, such as genetics and race, post-race debates, racial eliminativism and the legacy of Barack Obama, and mixed race i…
When Race Disappears
Starting from the case of Trayvon Martin, this essay explores the significant differences in the ways that blacks and whites in America narrativize the question of the post-racial. It insists upon the prevalence of racism beyond the ‘post-racial’ America associated with Obama’s election. Contrary to the notions that race has disappeared, it examines rather the persistence of racism in the contemporary moment. It explores the role of different kin…
Call and response
Goldberg's essay is an extended response to five reviews of his recent book The Threat of Race contributed by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Susan Giroux, Kelly Gillespie, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Peter Wade. Issues discussed range over the sadistic elements of racism's characteristic violence, the ‘disappearance’ or ‘invisibility’ of race and the impact on racisms, the distinction and relation between naturalism and historicism in racial articulation, and…
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
In this report, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg focus on the potential for shared and interactive learning made possible by the Internet. They argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity for world-wide community and the limitless exchange of ideas. The Internet brings about a way of learning that is not new or revolutionary but is now the norm for today's graduating high school and college classes. I…
A Political Theology of Race: Articulating racial southafricanization
Over the past three decades Stuart Hall has provided many of the key terms for (re)thinking the social, the cultural, and the political. Largely absent from his work has been consideration of religion and, given more recent theoretical developments, of the theologico-political. I pose a series of questions to Stuart Hall by considering an analysis of race as political theology, exemplified by a focus on the history of South African apartheid and …
Racial comparisons, relational racisms: Some Thoughts on Method
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 va…
Racial States
One of the most telling evasions in these past two decades of thinking about race has concerned the almost complete theoretical silence concerning the state. Not just the way the state is implicated in reproducing more or less local conditions of racist exclusion, but how the modern state has always conceived of itself as racially configured. The modern state, in short, is nothing less than a racial state. It is a state or set of conditions that …
Racial Palestinianization
The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
Preface and Acknowledgments vi Author's Note xii 1 Buried, Alive 1 2 Killing Me Softly: Civility/Race/Violence 32 3 Deva-Stating Discriminations, Discriminating Devastations (On Racial Americanization) 66 4 Targets of Opportunity (On Racial Palestinianization) 106 5 Precipitating Evaporation (On Racial Europeanization) 151 6 Revealing Alchemies (On Racial Latinamericanization) 199 7 A Political Theology of Race (On Racial Southafricanization) 245…
Field of Dreams: Cultures of Scholarship and Public Policy on Race in the United States
This article examines the complicity of academic paradigms and public policies with racist discourses and racial discrimination in the United States. From the most overt racial segregation policies and biological racist discourses to the most recent and covert forms of ‘color-blind racism’, the article discusses the shifting forms of racial discrimination and academic paradigms in the US. The first part discusses mainstream academic schools of th…
Racial Europeanization
This article examines what race has meant in and to Europe. If Europe has different, if related, histories of racial thinking, expression, imposition, and exclusion, how has it been shaped, in part, as specific region in the figure of race even as race, in the aftermath of World War II, is largely denied as a category applicable to human groups? And what today does Europe as a region, and the societies constituting it with all their internal vari…
Deva-Stating Disasters: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans
Neoconservative lobbyist Grover Norquist has declared that he wishes so to diminish government in the U.S. that he can drown it in a bathtub. This paper will address the ways in which Katrina has laid bare how the neoconservative attack on the state since the early 1980s, and especially in the past five years, has (1) targeted for devastation those public agencies supportive of the racially defined poor, thus rendering them far more vulnerable to…
Killing Me Softly”: Civility/Race/Violence
Civility's fading (and failing), so commonly supposed as the contemporary condition, has been attributed for the most part to the increasing heterogeneity and diversification of modern urban enviro
Racial Europeanization
This article examines what race has meant in and to Europe. If Europe has different, if related, histories of racial thinking, expression, imposition, and exclusion, how has it been shaped, in part, as specific region in the figure of race even as race, in the aftermath of World War II, is largely denied as a category applicable to human groups? And what today does Europe as a region, and the societies constituting it with all their internal vari…
The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
Preface and Acknowledgments vi Author's Note xii 1 Buried, Alive 1 2 Killing Me Softly: Civility/Race/Violence 32 3 Deva-Stating Discriminations, Discriminating Devastations (On Racial Americanization) 66 4 Targets of Opportunity (On Racial Palestinianization) 106 5 Precipitating Evaporation (On Racial Europeanization) 151 6 Revealing Alchemies (On Racial Latinamericanization) 199 7 A Political Theology of Race (On Racial Southafricanization) 245…
Racial comparisons, relational racisms: Some Thoughts on Method
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 va…
The semantics of race
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 d…
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…
The new segregation
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 an…
Call and response
Goldberg's essay is an extended response to five reviews of his recent book The Threat of Race contributed by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Susan Giroux, Kelly Gillespie, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Peter Wade. Issues discussed range over the sadistic elements of racism's characteristic violence, the ‘disappearance’ or ‘invisibility’ of race and the impact on racisms, the distinction and relation between naturalism and historicism in racial articulation, and…
Militarizing Race
Against the historical background of the transitions between religion and race, of race as the secularization of the religious, this article traces the ways race operates in the conduct of social struggles, wars, and warring in the making and refashioning of racial conception. This militarizing of society that has constitutively marked modern state formation shapes social disciplining of individuals and the regulation of social structures. The ar…
Call and Response: Sports, Talk Radio, and the Death of Democracy
This article critically analyzes the rapid growth in the United States of sports talk-radio programs, teasing out their race, class, and gendered implications, and attendant particularly to their role in commodification of American sports. The author argues that, far from being a democratizing force in America, sports talk radio reinscribes as it reflects and, indeed, covers up dominant positions of power and powerlessness. Thus, the proliferatio…
The Reason of Unreason: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg in conversation about Critique of Black Reason
David Theo Goldberg engages Achille Mbembe in a wide-ranging conversation on the key lines of analysis of Mbembe's book, The Critique of Black Reason. The discussion ranges across a broad swath of key themes: the constitutive feature of racisms in the making of modernity and modern capitalism as conceived through the global black experience; the African and French archives in constituting, resisting, and refashioning 'black reason' and its multip…
The end(s) of race
There is an esteemed tradition of working to end racial configuration in societies long marked by it. This tradition emerged out of resistance movements against racial slavery, subordination, suppr
Liberalism's limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the negro question”
(2000). Liberalism's limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the negro question”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 22, Race and social theory, pp. 203-216
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…
Vanishing points: Reflecting on My Respondents
The six reviewers all offer critically insightful readings of Are we all post-racial yet? In so doing, they identify aporias and pauses in the arguments of the book, signalling compelling lines of
When Race Disappears
Starting from the case of Trayvon Martin, this essay explores the significant differences in the ways that blacks and whites in America narrativize the question of the post-racial. It insists upon the prevalence of racism beyond the ‘post-racial’ America associated with Obama’s election. Contrary to the notions that race has disappeared, it examines rather the persistence of racism in the contemporary moment. It explores the role of different kin…
Deva-Stating Disasters: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans
Neoconservative lobbyist Grover Norquist has declared that he wishes so to diminish government in the U.S. that he can drown it in a bathtub. This paper will address the ways in which Katrina has laid bare how the neoconservative attack on the state since the early 1980s, and especially in the past five years, has (1) targeted for devastation those public agencies supportive of the racially defined poor, thus rendering them far more vulnerable to…
The Prison-House of Modern Law
Field of Dreams: Cultures of Scholarship and Public Policy on Race in the United States
This article examines the complicity of academic paradigms and public policies with racist discourses and racial discrimination in the United States. From the most overt racial segregation policies and biological racist discourses to the most recent and covert forms of ‘color-blind racism’, the article discusses the shifting forms of racial discrimination and academic paradigms in the US. The first part discusses mainstream academic schools of th…
Killing Me Softly”: Civility/Race/Violence
Civility's fading (and failing), so commonly supposed as the contemporary condition, has been attributed for the most part to the increasing heterogeneity and diversification of modern urban enviro
Racial Formation in Contemporary American National Identity
The American Philosophical Association approached me to convene a colloquium on race and ethnicity for its Pacific Division Meeting in March 1995. I set about putting together an interdisciplinary panel discussion- conceived as a conversation- on racial formation in contemporary American national identity. The conversation took place at the Miyako Hotel, San Francisco, March 30, 1995. What follows is an edited transcript of the proceedings. Part …
First freedom of information conference: Hungary
Raking the Field of the Discourse of Racism
In order to disavow our social life of a set of social relations as destructive as racism, it is necessary to comprehend it in its full complexity. It is little wonder, then, that racism is yet so much a feature of contemporary social experience. The prevailing accounts of racism institutionalized by the mainstream academic perspectives have created an object corresponding only in part to the wide range of racism's manifestations in our daily exp…
An Anthropological Perspective in Holistic Healing
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…
“Stay Out of Politics”: A Philosopher Views South Africa
The semantics of race
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 d…
First freedom of information conference: Hungary
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 an…
Anatomy of Racism
The Meaning of Yiddish. Benjamin HARSHAV
Whither West? The Making of a Public Intellectual
The Prison-House of Modern Law
Wedded to Dixie: Dinesh D'Souza and the New Segregationism∗
∗ I wish to thank my good friends Pat Lauderdale and Henry Giroux for their close readings of an earlier draft, and for their helpful suggestions. All responsibility for the force of opinion expressed below should be directed to Dinesh D'Souza
Racial Formation in Contemporary American National Identity
The American Philosophical Association approached me to convene a colloquium on race and ethnicity for its Pacific Division Meeting in March 1995. I set about putting together an interdisciplinary panel discussion- conceived as a conversation- on racial formation in contemporary American national identity. The conversation took place at the Miyako Hotel, San Francisco, March 30, 1995. What follows is an edited transcript of the proceedings. Part …
The new segregation
Call and Response: Sports, Talk Radio, and the Death of Democracy
This article critically analyzes the rapid growth in the United States of sports talk-radio programs, teasing out their race, class, and gendered implications, and attendant particularly to their role in commodification of American sports. The author argues that, far from being a democratizing force in America, sports talk radio reinscribes as it reflects and, indeed, covers up dominant positions of power and powerlessness. Thus, the proliferatio…
Surplus Value: The Political Economy of Prisons
(1999). Surplus Value: The Political Economy of Prisons. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 247-263
Liberalism's limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the negro question”
(2000). Liberalism's limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the negro question”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 22, Race and social theory, pp. 203-216
Response to Naomi Zack
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…
The ‘Good-natured bastard’: Canada and the Middle East refugee question
This essay reviews the history and political dynamic of Canada's involvement in the Middle East refugee problem. Among the signposts noted are the evolution of Canada's policy response to the humanitarian needs of peoples displaced by the first Arab-Israeli war (1948–49), including early support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); Canada's wielding of the gavel for the potentially volatile Multilateral R…
The end(s) of race
There is an esteemed tradition of working to end racial configuration in societies long marked by it. This tradition emerged out of resistance movements against racial slavery, subordination, suppr
Killing Me Softly”: Civility/Race/Violence
Civility's fading (and failing), so commonly supposed as the contemporary condition, has been attributed for the most part to the increasing heterogeneity and diversification of modern urban enviro
Field of Dreams: Cultures of Scholarship and Public Policy on Race in the United States
This article examines the complicity of academic paradigms and public policies with racist discourses and racial discrimination in the United States. From the most overt racial segregation policies and biological racist discourses to the most recent and covert forms of ‘color-blind racism’, the article discusses the shifting forms of racial discrimination and academic paradigms in the US. The first part discusses mainstream academic schools of th…
Racial Europeanization
This article examines what race has meant in and to Europe. If Europe has different, if related, histories of racial thinking, expression, imposition, and exclusion, how has it been shaped, in part, as specific region in the figure of race even as race, in the aftermath of World War II, is largely denied as a category applicable to human groups? And what today does Europe as a region, and the societies constituting it with all their internal vari…
Deva-Stating Disasters: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans
Neoconservative lobbyist Grover Norquist has declared that he wishes so to diminish government in the U.S. that he can drown it in a bathtub. This paper will address the ways in which Katrina has laid bare how the neoconservative attack on the state since the early 1980s, and especially in the past five years, has (1) targeted for devastation those public agencies supportive of the racially defined poor, thus rendering them far more vulnerable to…
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (29 works) · Gender Studies (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Politics (19 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Racism (15 works) · Race, History, and American Society (14 works)