In this essay, we examine recent developments in battles over race- and gender-based affirmative action across a 10-year period from the California Civil Rights Initiative (1996) to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (2006). While affirmative action policies have historically been contested within a paradigm of redistribution, our analysis of the Michigan case suggests a new strategic emphasis on disputing the legitimacy of the state's recognition of social difference. Drawing on the work of critical race and critical rhetoric scholars, as well as social theory on citizenship in the post-soul moment, we argue that a neoliberal understanding of difference and neoliberalism's appropriations of multiculturalism have allowed the anti-affirmative action movement in Michigan to avoid racist appeals completely by invoking the neoliberal myth of free, entrepreneurial individuals against a meddling, inefficient, authoritarian state. Further, we find that these shifts have permitted assaults on the positive consi...