The Critical Witness

Consciousness of racism becomes understood as a kind of false consciousness, as consciousness of that which is no longer. Racism is framed as a memory that if it were kept alive would just leave us exhausted. The task of citizenship becomes one of conversion: if racism is preserved only in our memory and consciousness, then racism would “go away” if only we too would declare it gone. The narrative implicit here is not that we “invent racism,” but that we preserve its power to govern social life by not getting over it. The moral task is thus “to get over it,” as if when you are over it, it is gone.