What might it mean to describe a society as postracial? It is a term that has been used to denote very different, sometimes conflicting, views of the world. For some commentators, postracial thinking requires a revolutionary shift. A postracial world of this kind would bring radical incoherence to the narratives of modernity, overturning our ideas about what it is to be human. For others, a postracial world implies, more modestly, a postracist world: a world in which racial inequalities have been removed. Both are aspirational views; no one seriously believes that we have reached either situation, in Britain or elsewhere.

However, there is another putative postracialism in the air. It rests upon an assumption that we have moved into a new phase in British society, wherein Britain's approach to race equality stands as a model for the world. This facile mode of postracialism does not assert that racism no longer exists; it is not that bold. Instead, it holds that racism has declined as a feature of social life: that it has lost much of its social salience and that consequently race is no longer a useful lens through which to understand social inequalities. In particular, its racial grammar eliminates concepts of structural and institutional racism and presents colourblind accounts of why racial inequalities persist. In fact, anything but racism is preferred as an explanation for disparities in unemployment, health outcomes, incarceration, police harassment or school exclusions.

The facile mode of postracialism has particular purchase in 21st-century Britain, where it informs much current discourse and policy, underpinning what this chapter calls state postracialism. In the early 2000s commentators such as Gilroy (2004), Bourne (2007) and Kundnani (2007) argued that Britain had shifted away from the models of state or municipal multiculturalism that had been a feature of social policy in the 1980s and 1990s (as in, for instance, the work of the Greater London Council, the Inner London Education Authority and the Macpherson Inquiry). That shift, Gilroy argued, was backed by a ‘growing sense that it is now illegitimate to believe that multiculture can and should be orchestrated by government in the public interest’ (Gilroy, 2004: 1).