File: powell final for Darby 2009] Created on: 3/15/2009 12:55:00 PM Last Printed: 4/3/2009 10:11:00 AM POST-RACIALISM OR TARGETED UNIVERSALISM 801 sion, when many American thought racialization and racism would be dead within ten years. Today many pundits are asserting that racialization is or soon will be a thing of the past. Thomas Friedman has stated that the civil war is finally over and the North has won.76 Others are asserting that the country is now going through a major realignment that will put an end to the Southern Strategy of appealing to white resentment.77 But the writers making these assertions have failed to take into account that only a few years ago most Americans had not even heard of the Southern Strategy, and that conservatives have been claiming for decades that we are beyond race. The process of racialization has changed and is changing. We continue to have some old-style explicit racists, but their numbers are declining. Even though we talk about white and non-white attitudes, there are a range of attitudes and conditions reflected in each racialized group. What may be more interesting is that most of us carry conflicting racial attitudes within ourselves.78 As President Obama accurately described, “None of us—black, white, Latino, or Asian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially stereotypes about [Blacks].”79 But it is a serious mistake to define racialization narrowly, only to then dismiss it. There are more possibilities than the Jim Crow racial practices of the 1950s and 60s, the colorblind position, or postracialism. We are in a space where our old way of thinking about race does not serve us well and can easily lead us to misunderstand the opportunities and challenges that are before us. There are two emerging sites for the practice of racialization today and they are related. The first site is in the processes and practices of inter-institutional arrangement that continue to distribute racialized outcomes in part because of our different situatedness. The second site is ambivalence that unconsciously impacts our racial meaning and practices. The first is called structural racialization80 and the second is called implicit bias.81 To start with the latter first, implicit bias research suggests that most of us have implicit biases that can impact our behavior 76. Thomas L. Friedman, Finishing Our Work, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 5, 2008, at A35, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/opinion/05friedman.html?ref=opinion. 77. See Adam Nossiter, For South, A Waning Hold on National Politics, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 11, 2008, at A1, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/us/politics/11south.html. 78. DREW WESTEN, THE POLITICAL BRAIN 221 (2007). 79. OBAMA, AUDACITY OF HOPE, supra note 16, at 138. 80. See Andrew Grant-Thomas & john a. powell, Structural Racism and Colorlines in the United States, 119 Twenty-First Century Color Lines: Multiracial Change in Contemporary America (Eds. Andrew Grant-Thomas & Gary Orfield, 2009); john a. powell, Structural Racism: Building Upon the Insights of John Calmore, 86 N. C. L. Rev. 791 (2008). 81. ASPEN INST. ROUNDTABLE ON CMTY. CHANGE, STRUCTURAL RACISM AND COMMUNITY BUILDING 11 (2004); Project Implicit, http://www.projectimplicit.net/generalinfo.php (last visited Jan. 9, 2009).