‘racism of the gaps’, which encapsulates this tendency to assume racism from the outset and take all analysis from there. As an article for the New York Times Magazine puts it, theorists ‘speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system of power relations that produces certain gestures, moods, emotions and states of being’. In his response to this piece, Andrew Sullivan was quick to identify the religiosity of the language. ‘It permeates everything everywhere,’ he writes. ‘Like the Holy Ghost?’
