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This chapter maps out the representational strategies used by television writers and producers after 9/11 to represent Arabs and Muslims as terrorists while avoiding Arab/Muslim terrorist stereotypes. It identifies a list of representational strategies used to illustrate how schematized they have become, and discusses the ideological work performed by them through “simplified complex representations”—the appearance of seemingly complex images and storylines that are in fact quite predictable and formulaic. While some of these strategies are used more frequently and more effectively than others, they all help to shape the many layers of simplified complexity. Simplified complex representations are the representational mode of the so-called post-race era, signifying a new era of racial representation. These representations appear to challenge or complicate former stereotypes and contribute to a multicultural post-race illusion or colorblindness.

The introductory section opens with a discussion of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, examining this text’s significance as part of a broader cultural moment in which the depressive episodes of white women are used to provide commentary on the moral decay of the Western world. It situates the book’s analysis within the fields of postfeminist media studies and critical race and whiteness studies. The Hollywood manifestation of postfeminist melancholia is attributed to several factors, including a resurgence of interest in feminist politics, conflicts in US race relations, and the shifting image of the US internationally. It then argues for the examination of this cinematic figure’s relationship to a politics of white hegemony, briefly exploring Hollywood’s history of utilising stories involving ethnic appropriation as a means of assuaging national anxieties associated with earlier socio-political movements, such as the civil rights movement and sexual revolution.

The final chapter concludes the book by examining some of the effects of problematizing ideas of race, racism, equity and so forth, and explicitly takes on the challenges that emerge when education policy is constituted by contradiction, incompleteness, and indeterminacy. The chapter revisits the key concepts of the book (events, biopolitics, race, cities, neoliberalism, difference) and places them within variegated histories of inequality and what alternatives policy scholars might consider in relation to these histories, and potential futures.

This chapter employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence” in order to analyse Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled. This film targets both the overtly racist cultural practices like minstrelsy as well as the more subtle, insidious forms of racism perpetuated by the belief of a post-race America. The film demonstrates the ease by which racial stereotypes are adopted, and the difficulty in moving past them.

Marilyn Chin is one of the few Asian American poets who openly declares her poetry as ’political’ and herself a feminist. This chapter deals directly with the question of her critical reception, first by examining the vitriolic battle between Chin and Copper Canyon Press that broke out in the pages of Poetry magazine in 2008. The Press’ sales and marketing director unfavorably compared Chin’s translation to one done by their own translator. Chin’s response called out what she saw as the veiled sexist, racist, and imperialist assumptions in his letter. She was skewered in subsequent issues of Poetry by various letter writers for ’playing the race card.’ Interestingly, her poems which are often as bitingly critical of racism, sexism, and imperialism, are met with more critical approval—likely because her use of irony entails the possibility of misreading, and might allow readers to miss some of her sharper critiques.

This chapter examines Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel—a text that refuses easy categorization by almost any criteria. Thought its title makes knowing reference to one of the founding texts of the English novelistic canon and its syntax often takes the form of ’well-written,’ somewhat formal, sentences, this Pamela is nonnarrative, filtered solely through the consciousness of a twenty-something Chinese American Californian. Markers of race are almost completely erased in the text, yet this is not a ’post-race’ novel, as some have averred. While Pamela: A Novel displays almost no thematic references to race, the consciousness of the Chinese-American narrator cannot be separated from the tale the book tells, nor from the very form of its poetic sentences, Indeed the text is so fully infused with the consciousness of this doubly minoritized narrator that it need not mark it’s speaker’s identity overtly or thematically.

This chapter examines the political pathologizing of blackness on the part of President Barack Obama, who seems to blame black male behavior for the country’s social problems. Obama, the leader of the post-race movement, raises a straw idea when he accuses blacks of making excuses for criminal behavior. In this manner, blackness is often presented politically as mutually exclusive to legitimate sociopolitical positionality. This chapter argues that Obama must know about racism in the criminal justice system. Racial profiling isn’t caused by the personal behavior of blacks but by the behavior of politicians and the so-called demography experts. The chapter asks why Obama ignores the facts when criticizing dysfunction in the black community, and is silent about dysfunction in the white community.

This concluding chapter argues that regional newspaper stories in Silicon Valley, California, create the appearance of a raceless society, strengthening legislative efforts in California to eliminate affirmative action, multiculturalism, and other racialized policies. The newspapers do this by constantly featuring “empirical” surveys predicting a majority minority in northern California cities and by reporting personal testimonies about the positive effects of “diversity,” such as interacting with people from all over the world. These media texts articulate a specific ideological representation of diversity in the post-race era in two ways. First, diversity signifies an abstract, idealized, and/or raceless representation and reality, in which cultural communities are collocated, while simultaneously emptied of any particular histories, social structures, or structural inequalities. Second, diversity and difference are depicted as universal; each cultural group is deemed to be the same and equal precisely because they are all equally different.

This chapter looks at the predominant narrative interpretation of Obama's victory, which is deemed as the “triumphalist narrative of post-race America.” It argues that such a narrative shows a series of deeply problematic assumptions about black Americans, the course of American history, and the roots of social inequality. The narrative's claim that the nation has been proved to be officially race-blind ignores the crucial ways that race did play into the presidential race. This “colorblind individualist” perspective on race dangerously masks entrenched racial inequality while claiming to champion racial justice. The chapter maintains that without an alternative, critical, and empowering analysis of the significance of Obama's win, this narrative is likely to become the new “common sense” about race in the contemporary United States.

This chapter examines contemporary political contexts that focuses on how attachment parenting (AP) matches with neoliberal politics and emphasizes the notion that society is 'post' race. It highlights both the specificities and similarities in Britain and Canada as they have similarly sized black populations and comparable histories of migration. It also offers unique and underexplored insights about contemporary blackness and motherhood in the two countries. The chapter looks at interviews with women and their shared characteristics that inform the analysis of their experiences. It describes scientific motherhood as the idea that mothering should be guided by scientific supervision and principles.

This chapter explores the debates on what race is. For some time, the dominant social constructionist approach in the social sciences has insisted that the only proper way to regard race is by refuting any connection with biology. Attention to the many ways in which race is socially constructed has been important; but, while a construction is not ‘unreal’, there is a common further step in which race is thereby deemed to be not valid. The rejection of race tends to treat race as something that would be ‘real’ if it were located in science and biology. The chapter then shows how recent developments in the natural sciences and changing views on the relationship between the natural and social sciences problematise that view. Yet in opposition to post-race views, critical scholars can then be seen to draw on conventional categories of race to show that racialised inequality still matters.

Kendrick Lamar registers as an explicitly political rapper who speaks against police violence and for black solidarity. But the reception of Kendrick Lamar—the idea of Kendrick as found in journalistic accounts of what he does—actually works against this notion of him as a rapper with progressive politics. This chapter explores the way legible politics can be easily co-opted into the mainstream by considering how Kendrick is received in a post-race, anti-black political discourse. The post-race reception of Kendrick takes the same form as neoliberalism’s creative destruction; his politics parallel neoliberalism’s economics. Lester Spence’s theory of black parallel publics in hip hop is expanded to include more contemporary examples and a post-race milieu.