Michaels thinks we live in an antiracist society. A racist society existed during Jim Crow. The first quote illustrates Eric's point about the separableness of race, gender, sexuality, etc.
"Is the relevant thing about all those people abandoned in New Orleans the fact that they are black or the fact that they are poor. We like blaming racism, but the truth is there weren't too many rich black people left behind when everybody who could get out of New Orleans did so. The Republican party policies that left the poor behind were not racist, and economic inequality in American society has grown under Democratic presidents as well as Republicans. That doesn't mean, of course, that racism didn't play a role in New Orleans. It just means that in a society without any racial discrimination, there still would have been poor people who couldn't find their way out of New Orleans. Whereas in a society without poor people (even a racist society without poor people) there wouldn't have been." (p 79)
So Michaels thinks you can have a racist society without poor people. Is he saying we could get rid of class society and still be racist? If so, then maybe it makes sense to consider that racism isn't extinct even in the humanities depts of universities. (See quote below where he claims it is) Be that as it may, clearly you can see that his target audience is people who think that Democrats are less racist than Republicans. So that mystery is solved *wink*
"There are a lot of anti-hate rallies in reaction against people using racial slurs or painting swastikas on dorm walls, and everyone will argue that the racial slurs and the swastikas on dorm walls are a bad thing. Indeed, it's precisely everyone's agreement that makes anti-hate rallies so powerful; they express a consensus. But it's also everyone's agreement that makes them a little puzzling. Why are we so committed to combatting a position no one actually holds?
Why in a world where most of us are not racist (where, on the humanities faculties at our universities, we might even plausibly note that racism isn't rare but that it is extinct), do we take so much pleasure in reading attacks on racism? Why do we like it so much that not only do we read books that attack a racism that *no longer exists* (author's emphasis)(Plessy was overruled half a century ago and it's been a long time since Wilson was president), but we also make bestsellers out of books that attack racism that *never* existed (author's emphasis). What -- to put the question in its more general form -- is the meaning of antiracism today?
One way to begin to answer that question might be to suggest that antiracism activates a certain nostalgia. Kenneth Warren's remarks on the nostalgia for Jim Crow among some black intellectuals are helpful here. (78-79)
It is curious that we're post-racial, yet people are painting swastikas and hurling racist epithets -- the events that prompt the rally to begin with.
"The function of race in a racist society (like Nazi Germany or Jim Crow America) was precisely to designate some people as more worthy of respect than others, and for many years as we all know, American universities tried to keep the wrong races out. Today, however, we're trying to get all the races in. The shift makes sense only in a society that, as we have seen, sees itself not as racist but as antiracist." (p 81)
(university retrenchment couldn't possibly play a role. hmmm....)