In the essay “The Whiter the Bread…” Alison Reed argues that post-racial refers to a society that attempts to argue that it “sees past race” due to supposed social progress that has occurred. This notion fails to address the nuance with race relations in American society, implying that because there are so many ways in which bodies are discriminated against culturally and under the law due to race, it is impossible to pretend that everything has progressed to a point where race is irrelevant (the “colorblindness” that Reed mentions). The idea that everybody is viewed as equal requires a strong re-working of the system that facilitated (and still facilitates) racial violence and cannot come from a moral shift. This moral shift also skirts discussions of accountability in American society, making people think that “racism was so long ago” despite it still being prevalent in the US.
Regarding “the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (Reed 57), I understand that as meaning the fetishization and intentional centering of black bodies in white queer rhetoric in order to distance oneself from whiteness. This can come off as self-serving because the ways in which people of color are provided opportunities and visibility in certain realms can come off as more of the white author distancing themselves from their white identity, or acting as if the connection to people of color “queers” their identity in any way.
This can also be present in the way in which queer theory is presented, where there are racialized politics regarding the way in which queer theory relates to society. Reed mentions this by saying that “queer theory at the same time spectacularly represents racialized embodiment as a way into its stylized origin narrative of trauma” (Reed 57). Because the way in which people experience trauma is intersectional, this notion also appears in the preexisting writings regarding queer theory.
SOURCE:
Johnson, E. Patrick, and Alison Reed. No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Duke University Press, 2016.