Myth of a postracial society

The Myth of a postracial society is the belief that racial progress has made racism a problem of the past, or that visible diversity proves inequality has been overcome. Austin contests it by setting celebratory accounts of progress against the persistent realities of anti-Blackness: the election of Barack Obama, she argues, did not usher in a postracial America, while workplaces and churches could praise diversity yet resist Black people’s agency and criticism. The myth survives not because history has ended, but because history is repeatedly made comfortable and incomplete.

Progress and Its Limits

For millions of white and Black Americans, Barack Obama’s election appeared to confirm that the country had become postracial. Austin does not dismiss the meaning of seeing the Obama family wave to crowds in Chicago after the victory speech; only a year earlier, she herself had considered the achievement impossible. But celebration existed alongside fear. Black Americans knew the history of murdered civil rights leaders and worried that Obama might be assassinated for winning the presidency. They also saw protests directed not at his policies but at his race, including nooses, signs, caricatures, and condescending claims that he did not understand America or its laws.

Austin expected racist backlash from ordinary white citizens, but Ferguson exposed the distance between the story of progress and the present more sharply than she had anticipated. Watching the television, she saw police in riot gear, with dogs, tear gas, and tanks confronting Black residents demanding accountability for the shooting of an unarmed teenager. The camera widened the frame: those facing the police were not a distant or alien population but people recognizable as parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and children. The scene recalled photographs from her history books, making the supposed boundary between past and present impossible to maintain. For Austin, the police presence in Ferguson did not signal that racism had simply evolved beyond its earlier forms; tanks and automatic rifles made the continuity frighteningly legible.

History Hidden in the Progress Story

Austin links the myth to the national habit of replacing an ordered account of racial history with comforting myths, patchwork timelines, and colonial ideals. The history that remains unreckoned with includes the Middle Passage and the kidnapping and enslavement of generations, as well as the wealth the South extracted from enslaved labor and the wealth the North gained from its products. Such omissions do more than leave gaps in public knowledge. They obscure the people whose bodies, labor, emotions, and lives were made part of the system.

The same concealment shapes accounts of the Civil War and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Recasting the Civil War as a dispute over states’ rights avoids naming slavery; celebrating civil rights victories while sanitizing the violence that opposed them makes resistance and backlash disappear from the story. Austin points to the humiliation, mob violence, burned homes, bombed churches and businesses, and lynchings of the Jim Crow era, then to the clubs, dogs, bombs, guns, and imprisonment that confronted civil rights activists. The story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words cannot substitute for the terror surrounding marches, boycotts, and jail cells, or for the white resistance to voting rights, integrated classrooms, and access to public spaces.

Nor, in Austin’s account, did the people who defended segregation vanish when celebrated victories arrived. White people who protected Jim Crow remained alive, as did the effects of redlining and the withdrawal of support from Black neighborhoods. Contemporary avoidance of Black neighborhoods and predominantly Black schools carries that history forward. The argument is not that past and present are identical, but that treating progress as a completed break makes continuing structures harder to see. Austin insists that naming the nation’s history would mean naming its commitment to violent and exploitative White supremacy—and confronting what that recognition requires people to change.

Diversity Without Shared Power

The myth also operates inside organizations that describe themselves as inclusive. In one board meeting, less than a year into her job and while seeking approval for a racial diversity training program, Austin heard the treasurer defend assimilation as the purpose of organizational culture: people from diverse backgrounds, he suggested, should become one unified organization. Her body froze and her mouth dropped open. She understood that the unity on offer would come at her expense, although the organization’s public mission statements promoted diversity. People of color on the team had already suspected that the institution wanted racial difference without differences in thought or culture.

Hiring and daily workplace conduct exposed the same tension in smaller scenes. After an interview in which people had expected a white man, the discovery that Austin was a Black woman left the interviewers searching her résumé and raised an unspoken question about whether she would fit the organization’s white culture. Organizations might promise a safe colleague for reporting racism and describe earlier incidents as resolved missteps. Yet within weeks, stereotypes could surface in comments about her hair, praise for being surprisingly articulate, requests to sound more Black, or assumptions that she could speak for every topic associated with Black life. When she reported incidents, the designated safe person might suggest she had misunderstood or should show more compassion; shifting the discussion from individual bad actors to white leadership and institutional habits could earn her labels such as divisive or toxic.

A single morning at work made those habits concrete. At 8:55 a.m., Austin was asked three times in the lobby whether she needed help finding the outreach center, while the white coworker following her was not. At 8:58, that coworker reached to touch Austin’s pineapple fro without permission, then appeared hurt when Austin pulled back. An hour later, the supervisor called Austin into her office and advised her to be a better team player after receiving a note that Austin had made someone uncomfortable. The sequence turned a claimed act of friendliness into an institutional judgment: Austin was treated as an outsider, her body as available for inspection, and her response as a problem for management to correct.

The Work of Challenging the Myth

The myth is sustained by narrowing what counts as racism: organizations may permit complaints about a few bad apples while resisting criticism of the systems that repeatedly select, protect, and reproduce white norms. It also shapes educational choices. In predominantly white schools, Austin had to decide whether to give the answer a teacher expected or to affirm Blackness in her assignments. She might state that the land Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered was already inhabited, or frame a correction as what the textbook stated; sometimes telling the truth cost her half a letter grade. These choices show how apparently ordinary standards can ask students to reinforce a comforting account of history.

For Austin, dialogue alone cannot undo that pattern. A conference, lecture, or sermon about diversity becomes useful toward reconciliation only when it leads to action, changes power, and pursues justice for marginalized people. Otherwise, listening to people of color can become the endpoint rather than a beginning, while tone policing shifts attention from the harm described to whether the speaker is sufficiently gracious. Organizations that count Black faces without sharing influence over leadership, funding, mission, or strategy preserve the underlying arrangement even as they display diversity.

Austin’s alternative is not faith in inevitable improvement. She does not expect herself, her children, or her grandchildren to live in an America that has achieved racial equality, and she connects present-day police brutality, racial disparities, attacks on voting rights, and racial animosity to a long history of hatred directed at Black bodies. The Shadow of Hope names the work that remains possible without a promise of seeing its final result: speaking, writing, loving, and returning to the work through disappointment. Against the Myth of a postracial society, that persistence keeps the past in view and refuses to mistake a visible sign of progress for justice accomplished.