12 Years a Slave: in our 'post-racial' age the legacy of slavery lives on - Guardian Paul Gilroy

[flamingdem]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/10/12-years-a-slave-mcqueen-film-legacy-slavery

12 Years a Slave: in our 'post-racial' age the legacy of slavery lives on

Slavery has been written off as part of the pre-history of our world. Contemporary capitalism was shaped by its rational brutality but the banks, insurers and speculators who facilitated and expanded slavery have been able to project their activity as unsullied by a cruel and racist system that was as systematic as it was functional. Financial institutions appear instead as the very agents of freedom, emancipating the archaic world of the plantation with their dynamic, modernising energy.

Today, neoliberalism reprises and extends that tale. It decrees that racism no longer presents a significant obstacle either to individual success or to collective self-realisation. Race provides a useful way to mark out the boundary between then and now: racism is presented as anachronistic – nothing more than a flimsy impediment to the machinery of colourless, managerial meritocracy.

Any residual effects of past inequality are effectively privatised – seen only on an individual scale. If you cannot succeed in contemporary conditions, that failure can only be a result of your own shortcomings. The newly multicultural market cannot be bucked; and slavery, though not yet quite forgotten, is entirely overshadowed by the heroic story of its abolition by the morally charged forces of economic progress.

[paulkienitz]

1. why did Paula Deen get shunned?

Because "Today, neoliberalism... decrees that racism no longer presents a significant obstacle either to individual success or to collective self-realisation. Race provides a useful way to mark out the boundary between then and now: racism is presented as anachronistic..."

It's all about pretending that racism is of the past and only a few weirdos are racist today. Hence the faux horror at Paula Deen when she admitted what is commonplace for lots of older people of her background.