Post-Racial or Just Post-Racist?

In the modern era, the media has become obssessed with the notion of a "post-racial" culture, a "colorblind" reality. As a society, we have had almost no discussion, however, about whether moving beyond race is desirable. The Matrix Reloaded presents a picture of a multiracial world, but a world removed from racial cultures and ideologies. (It would be remiss not to point out that the power structure responsible for controlling the Matrix is entirely composed of white males, and that the agents who attempt to stop the main characters are essentially clones of each other.) Ursula K. LeGuin, in The Lathe of Heaven, also refuses to assign racial categories, instead describing the appearance of her characters. The reader does eventually learn that Heather Lelache is multiracial, but only through her own description. In the world Dr. Haber creates through his manipulation of George Orr's dreams, racial prejudice is removed when all the world's people become a single shade of gray. Orr becomes uneasy when he can't find Heather Lelache, and realizes: "She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born" (LeGuin 130). Of perhaps deeper psychological interest, LeGuin has George Orr observe immediately after that "He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood" (130). LeGuin, then, posits white as raceless, just as The Matrix Trilogy removes the concept of race from consideration, if understood as not just an appearance, but as culture and ideology. To The Matrix overwhelmingly, and in an interrogated sense in LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, a colorblind, raceless society is seen as a utopia. In contrast, Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, in reference to literature (and one would imagine she would feel comfortable in extending her argument to media and the culture at large), "Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unneccessary surgery. A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal,' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist" (12). With this understanding, then, should we really aim to be post-race, or only post-racist? Why is the idea of raceless society as utopia so appealing? (Consider the fact that Morrison is African-American, while both LeGuin and the overwhelming majority of the corporate structure involved in the writing and production of The Matrix Trilogy is European-American, and the implicit normative state of whiteness.)