Paul Gilroy is a celebrated author but the 2002 Wellek Library Lectures published as a book in "Postcolonial Melancholia" (2004) may not be the best way to access his ideas. The lecture format might make the content more time bound and also geographically tied (to the British context). I will seek other avenues to Gilroy, and suggest others probably do likewise. A few quotes:
"The world becomes a different place once the history of black resistance in the Western Hemisphere has been added to our understanding of it , and an acknowledgement of the protracted suffering of African-descended peoples outside of Africa has contributed to the overdue redefinition of its fluctuating moral conscience." (p. 36)
"Once the history of the empire became a source of discomfort, shame and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders, without any substantive historical, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects." (p. 90)
"Because "race" ought (according to the tenets of liberalism) to be nothing, it is prematurely pronounced to be of no consequence whatsoever. Racism either disappears at this point or lingers on as a marginal issue, an essentially prepolitical event that should not be addressed by any government worthy of the name. To even suggest that it might be worthwhile to approach racism politically threatens a debasement of government and a travesty of justice. There is, in fact, no substantive problem here because racism requires no specific intervention beyond worn-out rubrics of generic liberalism." (p. 144)