Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism:

Placing “Race” in Neoliberal Discourses

David J. Roberts and Minelle Mahtani

Department of Geography and Planning
University of Toronto
100 St. George Street
Toronto, ON M5G 3G3
robertsd@geog.utoronto.ca mahtani@utsc.utoronto.ca

This intervention piece attempts to extend the ways neoliberalism and race are currently
conceptualized in geography. Rather than thinking about these concepts as two separate entities,
we insist on examining their co-constitutive qualities. Peck and Tickell (2002) argue that,

there is more to be done, both theoretically and empirically, on the specification

and exploration of different processes of neoliberalization. This would need to
take account of the ways in which ideologies of neoliberalism are themselves
produced and reproduced through institutional forms and poltical action, since
‘actually existing; neoliberalisms are always (in some way or another) hybrid of
composite structures (see Larner 2000). (Peck and Tickell 2002: 383)

We concur that it is important to analyze the processes through which the ideology neoliberalism
is actualized through the various policies, discourses, and social relations that make up the
processes of neoliberalization in society. However, this theorization can tend to limit analyses to
what we call moments of eruption of racial discrimination from processes of neoliberalization;
only including race in analyses that focus on neoliberalization actually limits the understanding
of the way that neoliberalism is thoroughly imbued with race. We argue that scholarship needs
to do more than map how processes of neoliberalization have racialized results and instead focus
the ways neoliberalism (its underlying philosophy) is fundamentally raced and actively produces
racialized bodies. Paying particular attention to the racialized discourses about immigrants in a

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Canadian newspaper, we argue that neoliberalism works to modify the ways in which race
functions. We attempt to provide a more precise theoretical backdrop for analysis of race as has
been recommended by geographers (McKittrick 2006, Pulido 2000).

The Contours of Neoliberalism in Geography

Neoliberalism has a long history in geographical thought. For this paper, we limit much of our
analysis of neoliberalism to the work that has directly examined the concept in relation to race.
Geographers have focused on the impacts that neoliberalization has had on institutions and
governmental policies (see Peck and Tickell 2002, Cope 2001, Theodore 2007). New
scholarship has begun to map the impacts of neoliberal policy reforms in terms of their racially
differentiated impacts. Nik Theodore’s work, Closed Borders, Open Markets: Immigrant Day
Laborers’ Struggle for Economic Rights, in its analyzing of the impacts of neoliberal policy
reforms on the lives of day laborers provides an interesting example of this new direction.
Theodore’s work provides a compelling look at how neoliberal policy reforms can have
significantly racialized impacts. As Theodore explains, “In the name of greater labor market
flexibility, the neoliberal regulatory project has sought to dismantle or seriously weaken labor
market insurance programs and job-protection legislation, and undermine trade unionism and
worker collective action.” (2007: 252-253). The result has been the emergence of an informal
economy of day laborers, who are largely comprised of ’illegal immigrants’, and due to their
precarious legal position bear the brunt of such social change as their access to legal recourses in
regards to unfair employment practices are circumscribed. Day labors, as a notably racialized
group, provide a compelling example of the ways in which neoliberal policy reforms disparately
impact certain racialized populations.

Theodore is not alone in mapping eruptions of racism that occur as a result of neoliberalization.
David Wilson’s book, Cities and Race: America’s New Black Ghetto (2006) also examines the
connection between race and neoliberalism. Wilson explores in impacts of neoliberal policy
reform on the entrenchment and expansion of the racialized ghetto within the American rust belt.
He introduces readers to a cast of characters, such as ‘Welfare Queens’, ‘welfare-hustling men’,
and ‘black youth gangbangers’ that Ronald Reagan used to capitalize upon the fears of the
country and direct them at the ghetto. In each of these terms, race, specifically blackness,
coupled with anti-market behaviors become intertwined in the construction of the antithesis of
the ideal neoliberal citizen in the black ghetto resident. In his analysis, race is mobilized to show
that racialized subjectivities are essential in justifying certain impacts of neoliberalization that are
experienced disproportionately within racialized communities. However, Cities and Race fails to
provide a precise examination of how these black ghettos are connected to a wider racialized
system within U.S. (or Western) society. In fact, at several points in the book, Wilson quotes the
language used to describe the ghetto that is highly evocative of the history of racism, such as “the
inner city as primitive engulfers of societal resources,” (2006:62) contrasting this with other
‘spaces of civility’ within the city (2006:60), but he never fully unpacks the use of this language
to explain how it historically connects global tropes to the dehumanizing history of race.

We draw from these two examples to demonstrate that while they both should be lauded in many
respects, in both cases, the resulting theorization treats racism as an inevitable result of
neoliberalization rather than mutually constitutive with neoliberalizing policies. The racist
eruptions that result from neoliberal policies and practices are cited, but race is imagined as a
fixed category, where individual racialized groups are seen as distinct and mapped onto
neoliberal policy outcomes. Neoliberalization is understood as a socioeconomic process that has
racial implications, but little is said about the ways that neoliberalism modifies the way race is
experienced or understood in society. We suggest that this theorization is incomplete. We
recommend a move from analyses of race and neoliberalism towards analyses that race
neoliberalism. This kind of analysis more clearly delineates how race and racism are inextricably
embedded in the neoliberal project. To begin the process of racing neoliberalism, it is essential to
understand neoliberalism as a facet of a racist society that works to both reinforce the racial
structure of society, while also modifying the processes of racialization. As other geographers
have pointed out (McKitrrick 2006, Pulido 2006, Gilmore 2006) race is a fundamental organizing
principle in society. We suggest that there is a seductive, common-sense logic to neoliberalism
that reproduces racist ideologies. We highlight the fruitfulness of this way of understanding race
and neoliberalism in our case study.

Methodological approach
For our analysis, we examined the ways that immigration and immigrants were positioned in a
leading Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail. We conducted an archival search of The
Globe and Mail from October 1, 2002 to September 30, 2006 to create an initial dataset made up
of all articles containing the term ‘immigration’ in their title, abstract, and/or within their text.
Our initial archival search produced a data set of 3754 articles that included the word
‘immigration’ in the title, text or abstract during this period. From this data set, we pared the
sample down to 896 articles by eliminating those articles not about immigration, immigrants or
refugees in Canada. Within our analysis, we chose to include editorials, opinion pieces, guest
columns, and letters to the editor to grasp a full picture of what a typical reader might read about
immigration in The Globe and Mail. Each article and letter was treated the same for purposes of
coding. From a set of 55 sub-themes, several major themes emerged as distinct ways in which
The Globe and Mail communicated stories about immigration. While certainly the sheer number
of stories that touted immigration as important to increased economic success (14 % of the
articles) or the number that linked immigrants to criminal activities or terrorism (24 % of the
articles) influenced our findings, our approach was to examine the discourse at a more macro
level by examining the ideals and discourses that appeared to be underpinning The Globe and
Mail’s choice of coverage.

Extending Harald Bauder’s (2008) analysis of immigrant portrayals, where he outlines the
connections between immigration and utility, we also found that many stories in this paper
celebrate the virtues of immigration and its link to a successful Canadian economy. However,
while Bauder investigates the contents of this economic-utility perspective of immigration in
light of neoliberal restructuring in Germany, we examine the racialized representation of the
immigration and its relationship to neoliberalization the word “race” nor “racialization” never
appears in Bauder’s analysis. In other words, we are interested in the ways in which the
discourses that Bauder identifies work to modify how race is understood and experienced as a
result from neoliberal policy reforms (and their corresponding discourses). Our analysis starts
from a similar place as Bauder by examining a strikingly similar set of discursive constructions
of immigrants in the Canadian newsprint, but works towards a different theoretical end.

Through a focus on the utility and productive nature of immigrants for Canada’s growth,
immigrants are depicted as adding significant utilitarian value to the Canadian economy. This is,
of course, a strongly neoliberal argument (Bauder 2008). Articles such as “Labour shortage woes
loom, research says” on September 9, 2005, “New Canadians can keep the lights shining on the
Prairie” on November 23, 2005, and “Ontario eyes brightest immigrants” on October 11, 2006
underscore the need for immigrants to shore up Canada’s economy. Immigrants are seen as a way
to solve many of Canada’s pressing concerns from low fertility rates and an aging population, to
the growing demand for skilled labor and doctors, to fuelling hot housing markets. Racism and its
accompanying stereotypes associated with immigrants (high fertility, non-professional
aspirations) are effectively mobilized as desirable whereas historically these were seen as
negative attributes of immigrants. These presumed features of the potential immigrant
population are part of a racist lexicon that was previously employed to denigrate immigrants.
Now, the same discourse is manipulated to present immigrants as a more “desirable” population
(who at the same time know their place). A few examples of this theme follow:

For governments, success will mean overhauling pension rules to allow older people
to work longer; it means abolishing the fear that immigrants will take away jobs
from Canadians, removing impediments to immigrants who want to work here and
bringing in more of them; it means luring women into the work force with larger
daycare subsidies and flexible hours. (“Plenty of work, not enough bodies”;
Brethour and Scoffield 2006:B4)

and

Mr. McGuinty will outline plans to attract a steady influx of new Canadians by
capitalizing on the province's rich multicultural heritage, said senior government
sources. "The province's diversity is one of our biggest economic advantages if we
leverage it properly," one of the sources said. The emphasis on immigration -- and
Ontario as a place where newcomers can build a better future for their families --
will mark the first time a government attempts to link the province's cultural
diversity to its economic prosperity. (“Ontario eyes brightest immigrants”; Howlett
2005: A7)

Such stories recognize the importance of recruiting immigrants, emphasizing that Canadians
should embrace immigrants because they add value to the Canadian economy. However, there is
another side to this story. Despite the calls to embrace immigrants because of their contribution to
Canada’s well-being, beneath the surface lies a much more pernicious level of discourse that
persistently racializes immigrants as not-quite-Canadian. What is of interest to us here is the way
that the immigrant is effectively positioned as, paradoxically, both the “good-guy” and the “bad-
guy”. On the one hand, the immigrant is seen as contributing to a particular segment of the
nation’s economy. On the other hand, the immigrant is effectively demonized as deviant,
criminalized and tarnishing the supposed Canadian way of life. We suggest that we might begin
to understand this complex and complicit relationship as being fundamentally shaped by
neoliberalism in contemporary Canada.

While it would be short-sighted and incorrect to understand the racialization of the immigrant as
something brought about by the rise of neoliberalism, since this process obviously has a much
longer history in Canada as elsewhere, it is important to understand how the neoliberal moment
has allowed for the development of new discourses that reinforce this process.

The Co-Constitutive Nature of Race and Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism in Canada has effectively reshaped the ideal conception of the relationship
between the citizen and the society (and the corresponding obligations that each has to the other).
As Dana-Ain Davis explains in Narrating the Mute: Racializing and Racism in a Neoliberal
Moment:

Neoliberal practices pull into its orbit a market of ideas about a lot of things
including the family, gender, and racial ideology. It is, as Lisa Duggan (2003)
notes, “saturated with race” (xvi) using capitalism to hide racial (and other)
inequalities by relocating racially coded economic disadvantage and reassigning
identity-based biases to the private and personal spheres. (Davis 2007: 349)

Specifically, it has meant the establishment of a market orientation to this relationship. Ideally,
within a neoliberal theorization of society, the success of the individual is directly related to the
work output of that individual. Under this ideal, modalities of difference, such as race, no longer
predetermine one’s success as each individual is evaluated solely in terms of his or her economic
contribution to society. What becomes clear, however, with an examination of the discourses of
neoliberalism in the contemporary Canadian context, is that this ideal relationship is obviously
not ideal for everyone – certainly not for immigrants. Herein lies the double-edged sword of
neoliberalism. Constituting the immigrant as not-quite Canadian allows for the continued
disconnect between their ability to play the neoliberal game and the rewards that they receive for
successful play. This can be seen through policies that continue to disregard foreign degrees or
other credentials that is at the heart of the deskilling process, for example. Yet, as immigrants are
racialized within the economy of Canada, claims of racism under neoliberalism are
fundamentally ruled as outside of the way in which society – especially Canadian society - is
structured. Davis, again, provides a useful articulation of this process:

Under neoliberal racism the relevance of the raced subject, racial identity and
racism is subsumed under the auspices of meritocracy. For in a neoliberal society,
individuals are supposedly freed from identity and operate under the limiting
assumptions that hard work will be rewarded if the game is played according to the
rules. Consequently, any impediments to success are attributed to personal flaws.
This attribution affirms notions of neutrality and silences claims of racializing and
racism. (Davis 2007: 350)

As a consequence, neoliberalism effectively masks racism through its value-laden moral project:
camouflaging practices anchored in an apparent meritocracy, making possible a utopic vision of
society that is non-racialized. David Theo Goldberg’s articulation of racist culture is particularly
useful in understanding how race is both evoked and suppressed under neoliberal discourse.
Goldberg’s project in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning is to “map the
overlapping terrains of racialized expression, their means and modes of discursive articulation,
and the exclusions they license with the view to contending and countering them.” (Goldberg
1993: 9) His central thesis is that modern racist culture is marked, fundamentally, by its refusal to
acknowledge the role that racism plays in everyday structures of society and how these structures
work to fundamentally disguise and, simultaneously, reify the power of racism within society.
He intricately describes the ways liberalism sanctions racist institutions and reproduces racial
knowledge with every outwardly progressive gesture, which works to normalize racism as just an
aspect of life.

Along similar lines, Henry Giroux insists that the meanings, definitions and challenges of racism
alter each generation, and that the challenge for scholars is to develop a new language for
understanding how race redefines the relationship between the public and the private (Giroux
2008). Giroux points out that race, and in particular, long histories of racism and injustice are
effectively eradicated within neoliberal discourse because human agency is understood as a series
of individualized choices: “success is attributed to…entrepreneurial genius while those who do
not succeed are viewed either as failures or utterly expendable…neoliberal racism either
dismisses the concept of institutional racism or maintains that it has no merit” (Giroux 2008: 65
and 71). Thus, in trying to understand the connection between race and neoliberalism, we
recommend that it is important to examine not just the momentary eruptions of race or racism
that seemingly result from neoliberal policy reforms, and instead consider race as an organizing
principle of society that neoliberalism reinforces and modifies. As Giroux reminds us, “even
more than being saturated with race, neoliberalism also modifies race (Giroux 2005).” (Davis
2007: 349) Neoliberalism policy is sneaky because it can force the hand of apparent race-
blindness by insisting that race does not play an important role.

What our analysis of the discourses on immigration in the Globe and Mail suggests to us is that
the promise of this ideal conception of neoliberalism does not ring true for immigrants in Canada.
Immigrants are vital for the continued success of the economy and are invited to enter the
workforce as neoliberal subjects, but are not necessarily rewarded with the ascendancy normally
offered to neoliberal (read: white) citizens. This is not just because the policies resulting from
neoliberal reforms have disparate impacts on racialized or immigrant groups, but rather that the
race and the racialization of immigrants is embedded in the philosophical underpinning of these
policies.

Of interest to us is the way that the Globe and Mail is careful to avoid blatantly racist terms in its
discourse on immigration. Scholars have remarked that neoliberalism has fostered a shift from
rabid and overt forms of racism towards more insidious forms of racism (Giroux 2008). With the
Canadian multicultural policy as its backdrop, it is now well-recognized that it is simply
unacceptable in contemporary Canada to use blatantly racially inflammatory or discriminatory
language. Such behavior would be readily identified as racist. To counteract this potential
accusation, seemingly race-neutral descriptors are employed instead, like ‘immigrant’, which, as
Jiwani points out, in the context of Canadian media, is a highly racialized term itself (Jiwani
2006). She explains that a key signifier embedded in the use of the term ‘immigrant’ is the
understanding of ‘the immigrant’ as a racialized individual. This surface-level, supposed race-
neutrality in the media discourses serves two purposes; first, it works to silence the work of race
and racism in influencing the discourse on contemporary views of immigration in Canada. It also
suppresses challenges that this kind of discourse is, at its core, fundamentally racist. As a result,
this neoliberal-influenced discourse both modifies the way that discussions of racism in
contemporary discourse can take place, while silencing the ways in which racist thinking
saturates the very organizing principles of neoliberalism.

Conclusion
“[We need to] develop better theoretical frameworks for understanding how power, politics and
pedagogy as a political and moral practice work in the service of neoliberalism to secure consent,
to normalize authoritarian policies and practices, and to erase a history of struggle and injustice”
(Giroux 2008:180).

We have argued that current conceptualizations of neoliberalism in geography require more

precise articulations that move beyond simply citing the eruptions of race/racism that result from
neoliberalization, towards actually shaking the racist foundations that saturate neoliberalism. Our
brief analysis of articles about immigration in the Globe and Mail demonstrates the way a
neoliberal-influenced “common sense” discourse is employed – a discourse which effectively
eradicates histories of injustice facing immigrants in Canada.

Geographers are ideally situated to examine the ways that an unconscious embrace of
neoliberalism has lead to a modification of the functioning of race within society and the way
race is discussed. Making these links is important because, as Giroux reminds us, “it is crucial to
examine what role public intellectuals…and universities actually play pedagogically in
constructing and legitimating a neoliberal notion of common sense, and how the latter works
pedagogically in producing neoliberal subjects” (Giroux 2008:173). Our analysis offers a glimpse
of the ways immigrants are constructed as neoliberal subjects through “common-sense”
discourses. Rather than pointing to some sort of definitive conclusion, this paper can merely offer
up some new questions as to the promising possibilities that can be examined in understanding
the complex relationship between neoliberalism and race. We believe in the potential of
geographical analyses to consider both race and neoliberalism in a plurality of forms, where we
consider various racialized neoliberalisms rather than a singular, “capital-N” Neoliberalism. It
also provides a glimpse at a more precise analysis of race in our discipline. To this end, we
believe asking new questions about geography’s particular epistemological history with race
would provide us with a valuable approach towards developing new research on race,
neoliberalism and geography. We look forward to seeing scholars engage with race and
neoliberalism in geography in ways that do not reinforce static categories of racial ontologies and
epistemologies.

Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited from the critique of Sue Ruddick. We are also grateful for her invitation to
present an earlier version of this paper at the AAGs in Boston, MA in April 2008.

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