David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute. He is also Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. As a scholar, he is best-known for his work on critical race theory and digital humanities. Goldberg was born and raised in South Africa, and earned degrees in economics, politics, and philosophy from the University of Cape Town. He then earned a PhD in philosophy from the City University of New York in 1985. He is the author of Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993), The Racial State (2002), and co-author of The Future of Thinking (2010). He edited Anatomy of Racism (1990) and Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1995). He was the founding co-editor of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. He has held grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, among others.
Goldberg’s lecture consisted of three parts. In the first, he described different notions of occupation and the way occupation is racially recognized and characterized. In the second, he focused on racial neoliberalism, explaining the way that neoliberalism has transformed the conception of race and the many ways in which it operates. In the third, he offered some examples of how race has made it possible to display indecency without attracting reproach. Goldberg explored the emergence of neoliberalism at the moment when civil rights movements, postcolonialism, and immigration from former colonies to former imperial centres ignited concerns about the thickness and extension of the welfare state. The welfare state gave way to what he called the “traffic cop state,” which signifies not a rolling back of state authority but a shift in its emphases, increasing repressive state apparatuses even as control of caretaking agencies are passed on to the private sector. Race, in turn, became privatized, making race and racism into a matter of personal morality rather than public law. In our neoliberal times, the state can deny the existence of racism because its privacy laws prohibit data collection on race even though the legacy of material deprivation persists. Instead of seeing homogeneity as the natural condition of humans, Goldberg urged, we must take up heterogeneity as an antidote to the “conceit of control.”