A Critical Theory of Global Colorblindness

Graduate Colloquium Collaboration Meeting with Law as Science

Michelle will address the components to a Critical Race Theory of Global Colorblindness (CRTGC). A CRTGC combines Critical Race Theory precepts within critical international law, world-systems sociological insights, and racial ideology conceptualizations. I conceptualize a CRTGC as: (1) predicated on racist erasure; (2) produced through a global racial paradigm of colorblindness and politiculture of neoliberalism: (3) embodying multiscale racial interactions that create complex, varying colorblind politicultures but (4) reflects a stable global racial architecture; and (5) is anchored by the authority of white racial knowledge and the performance of racial ignorance. With that, I elaborate on six colorblind politicultures across the globe: post-racialism, multiculturalism, mestizaje and racial democracy, ethnic dominance, ‘predicament of Blackness,’ and conservative right. An investigation into global colorblindness unearths how colorblind discursive and material forms travel, land, and maneuver in every region and country across the globe. 

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