Post-racial Vulnerabilities

Black feminists and feminists of colour have rendered visible how, as an unmarked centre of power, whiteness regulates access to both discourse and subjectivities (Collins 1991; Mirza 1997, 2009; Moraga, Anzaldúa 1981). In postcolonial theories, whiteness is examined as an imperialist trope with strong links to innocence (McClintock 1995; Purtschert and Fischer-Tiné 2015, Purtschert 2019). Gloria Wekker (2016) proposes the notion of “white innocence” as a discursive position that is based on a combination of collective ignorance of race and its relevance and active investment in indifference to racial inequalities. For Wekker, innocence is a particularly powerful trope in Europe that also invokes vulnerability. The European genealogies of innocence link to Christianity, the white bourgeois figure of the innocent child and the femme fragile. Innocence or innocent figures are thereby constructed as those who deserve protection, those who are less aggressive, less strong but more affectionate and relational. The proximity of whiteness and innocence thus actively relies on a denial of the violence caused by the colonial history, the power of race and their effects on contemporary racism (ibid.). Moreover, it produces unequal vulnerabilities along the lines of race (Michel 2016). This theoretical paper queries which subjects are considered vulnerable in post-racial discourse? In answering this question, it will focus on two post-racial tropes that uphold those unequal vulnerabilities: (1) the construction of anti-racism as an attack on whiteness and (2) the universalization of racism, as a phenomenon that affects everyone equally.