The aftermath of race: The politics and perils of theorizing racial identities in education in the age of information

Contemporary racial theorization in education still separates race from the dynamics of our late-modern society. This essay aims to redirect the topic of race and education to a place that is considered outside the field of education, to the margin where education now is drawn into the fast moving currents of change fueled by the amplification of meanings and images in electronic mediation in the digital economy, in the volatile world politics post 9/11, but most of all in the crescendo of movement, migration and the work of the imagination of the great masses of the people. In what follows, Cameron McCarthy shifts conceptual and practical focus on racial antagonism in education from the mainstream and multicultural emphasis on teaching and curriculum reform, to the coordination of racial identities, the organization of affect and the differential patterns of historical incorporation of different social groups into modern social institutions defined by the restlessness of late-modernity.