Has Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream Been Realised?

I shall be participating in this global debate on 28 August to commemorate 50 years of Dr King’s assassination and ask has his dream been realised. In a purportedly ‘postracial’ world, many would claim it has but, as Gavan Titley and I argued in The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a  neoliberal age, the claim that we are post-race is one of the ways in which racism is laundered today. The ability of race to find new form, moulding itself to current contexts is its power. We don’t have to look much further than the manufactured refugee ‘crisis’ in Australia or the disproportionate criminalisation and incarceration of Aboriginal people to see how race continues to structure society in pernicious ways.