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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
While there has been a wealth of research and conversation about the role of racism in shaping our social, political and economic structures, antiracism – its highly publicized counterpart – has been very little studied, discussed or debated. Veteran race scholar John Solomos argues in this slim intervention that we urgently need to re-focus research and activist agendas to address this gap in knowledge.
The core questions addressed in the book include: what does antiracism mean in the contemporary environment? How do states, political institutions and civil society define and practise antiracism? What is the role of alliances across race, class and gender in shaping possible futures beyond racism? Moving beyond the valuable work which has already uncovered the ways in which race and racism are made and re-made, these questions cut to how to develop meaningful political and policy initiatives framed by antiracist ideas and values. If we hope to make sense of the evolution of contemporary racisms in the world around us in order to tackle them head on, antiracism needs to be better understood.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1. Rethinking Antiracism
Histories and the present
Theorizing antiracism
Antiracism in perspective
The changing politics of antiracism
Thinking beyond antiracism
Key themes and chapter outline
2. Antiracisms in the Present
Racisms and antiracisms
Forms of antiracism
Evolution of antiracism
Politics, antiracism and resistance
Rethinking the politics of antiracism
3. From Theory to Practice
Movements, ideas, policies
Antiracist policies and practices
Changing racial orders
Local and community mobilizations
Everyday forms of antiracism
Forming alliances, making change
Limits and contradictions
4. One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back
What kind of difference has antiracism made?
Antiracism and power relations
Activism and routes to change
Antiracism and popular culture
Corporate antiracism
The politics of anti-antiracism
Denials of racism
Ways forward
5. Beyond Antiracism?
What kind of antiracism do we need today?
Antiracist strategies and standpoints
Reimagining a politics of racial justice
A comparative analytical frame
Antiracism as the problem
Will racism ever end?
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Antiracism: A Critique
JOHN SOLOMOS
polity
Copyright © John Solomos 2025
The right of John Solomos to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5623-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024937985
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.
However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The idea for this book came to me at the time when there were mobilizations around the symbol of Black Lives Matter in 2014, and then again in 2020. Alongside broader conversations about the continuing significance of racialized inequalities, decolonization of the curriculum in fields such as education, and ongoing efforts to develop policies to deal with the everyday realities of cultural, religious and other differences in our societies, these mobilizations and protests raised the question of how we can develop a better understanding both of the changing forms of racism in the world around us and of the efforts to develop strategies informed by ideas and values that sought to overcome racism. The latter are often talked about under the generic term of antiracism. Give this background, it seemed important to me to place the question of antiracism squarely on the agenda in terms of both research and scholarly conversations, but also to explore the linkages between these conversations and policy and political debates.
This book takes as its starting point the argument that we need to address the question of antiracism more centrally in scholarship and research about race and racism in contemporary societies. It has grown out of a concern to engage with the question of how we can address the challenges we face in developing a critical analysis of the development of antiracist strategies and standpoints over the past few decades, and their implications for the future. Although we have some accounts of both of these issues, there are notable gaps in our historical understanding as well as the analysis of the current situation. This book is therefore an intervention into current debates that have emerged, particularly in recent times, about what kind of antiracist strategies we need in the present in order to address racialized inequalities and racism. Like much research in sociology, and the social sciences more generally, it is driven by curiosity and by an engagement with ongoing conversations in the society around us. In this case, I am curious to know more about the silences on antiracism and what can be done to encourage more conversations about this important issue.
In engaging in these ongoing conversations, I am aware that there is a need to hear different voices on how we can imagine antiracist futures in the world around us, and so this book is offered as a way to push some key aspects of current scholarly and policy debates forwards. Indeed, part of the point of writing this book is to encourage more research and scholarly reflection on antiracism as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon. Even as the book is being written, it is clear that the issues it addresses are constantly evolving and changing, and no doubt different perspectives from the one outlined here will be offered in the coming period. Questions about racism and antiracism are increasingly at the heart of political controversies across the globe, as has become evident over the past decade in the US, the UK, Europe, Brazil, and more generally across the globe. Debates about antiracism are very much part of the culture wars going on around us at the present time.
In writing this book, I have accumulated a number of debts to both individuals and institutions that I would like to acknowledge. First of all, I would like to thank my family, particularly Christine, Nikolas and Daniel, who have helped me maintain a sense of perspective as I worked on this book, even when it meant spending too much time in the study. Second, my long-standing collaboration with Martin Bulmer in editing the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies together, from 1995 to 2020, was another important influence on my work, including that which led to this book. I am grateful to Martin for his generosity of spirit and his constant encouragement to pursue my interests. Third, it is also important for me that I have been able to discuss many of the ideas that have coalesced into this book with various generations of students at Birkbeck; Southampton; City, University of London; and Warwick. In trying to teach them, I learned myself along the way, just as I hope they did. I am grateful for the opportunity they gave me to try out some of the ideas and arguments that have found their way into this book. Finally, for help of various kinds along the way, I would also like to acknowledge the support of numerous friends and colleagues, including Claire Alexander, Les Back, Manuela Bojadžijev, Milena Chimienti, Adrian Favell, Nicholas Gane, Paul Gilroy, Clive Harris, Michael Keith, Caroline Knowles, Marco Martiniello, Nasar Meer, Ali Meghji, Karim Murji, Steve Pile, Liza Schuster, Miri Song, Brett St Louis, Satnam Virdee, Aaron Winter and Eda Yazici. I am blessed to count on their collegial support and interest in talking through issues of common concern to all of us. Colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick have provided a supportive base for me for over a decade, and I am grateful for their ongoing support and encouragement. Warwick is in many ways a unique university and I have benefitted in many ways from being part of it. It is also important to acknowledge the support of my publisher at Polity, Jonathan Skerrett, who has been very helpful and enthusiastic at all stages of the development of this project, even when I was late.
During the writing of this book, I have enjoyed my walks and meditations around Crouch End, Parkland Walk, Highgate Wood, Queens Wood, Hampstead, Alexandra Park and Priory Park, and other parts of North London. Not only do they give me the opportunity to enjoy the natural soundscapes as well as my musical ones, but they help to keep me relaxed and focused on thinking through some of the key arguments outlined in this book. During my walks, I was blessed to be able to listen to the music of Rhiannon Giddens, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Horace Andy and so many other musicians whose music helped me reflect on what I was trying to say in this book. I am also blessed to be a supporter of West Bromwich Albion, and my trips to watch them all over the country helped by providing both a distraction and enjoyment in equal measure. Along with travelling companions from the London Baggies, I have enjoyed a number of memorable, and sometimes painful, trips to watch our storied and beloved team. For me, WBA have been and will always remain more than a football team.
John SolomosCrouch End, London
1Rethinking Antiracism
Antiracism has been and remains relatively neglected in scholarly and research agendas, although it is often referred to in public discussions about such topics as racial disadvantage, immigration, education, policing and related policy issues. This relative neglect is not easy to explain in the current intellectual climate. Given the rapid expansion of research and teaching on questions about race and racism since the end of the twentieth century, we now have large and expanding bodies of scholarship on various facets of racism in contemporary societies, as well as increasing amounts of historical research that explores the changing role of race and racism in modern societies (Andersen and Collins 2020; Golash-Boza 2016; Solomos 2020). Whatever the merits of the key strands of scholarship and research on racism that have become entrenched in much of higher education and beyond over the past few decades, the end result of the expanding bodies of work that have been produced over this period is that we now have a more rounded and nuanced understanding of how racisms have evolved and impacted on the world around us over the past few centuries. In particular, we now have important bodies of research and scholarship on key facets of the workings of race and racism in shaping social and political relations in contemporary societies. There is also a wide range of studies of both national trends and developments as well as some comparative accounts of the role of race and racism both historically and in the present. There has also been a rapid expansion of specialized journals focusing on race and racism, as well as increasing coverage of these issues in mainstream social science journals
Yet, with a few notable exceptions, relatively little attention has been given to critical accounts of antiracism, its origins and impact both on historical processes and on contemporary societies (Bonnett 2000; van Dijk 2021; Zamalin 2019). There are a number of accounts of antiracism that date back to the 1990s and early 2000s, and they provide an important resource in trying to trace the histories of antiracism at the end of the twentieth century, including the important mobilizations that took place against the growth of neo-fascist and other extreme right political movements and ideologies (Anthias and Lloyd 2002; Lloyd 1998; Twine and Blee 2001). But these accounts do not cover the developments over the past three decades or provide a guide to the ideological and policy shifts that we have seen over this period.
This lack of attention to antiracism as a social and political phenomenon has meant that relatively little historical or contemporary scholarship has explored in any detail the national, local and community-level mobilizations of antiracist movements and organizations. There have been some important studies of the evolution and changing role of antiracist movements in European societies as well as in North America (Bakan and Dua 2014; Fella and Ruzza 2013), but again there is a clear need for more detailed accounts of these movements and mobilizations and their complex histories.
In order to redress this relative neglect of antiracism in dominant research agendas, there is a need to rethink our scholarly and policy frameworks through a critical intervention framed around the need for a more sustained conversation about antiracism and its positioning in wider debates about race and racism in the world around us. It may seem evident that by studying racisms in the past and the present we can also address questions about what can be done to tackle their impact on the social, political and cultural institutions of our societies. Yet, as will be argued throughout this book, such taken-for-granted assumptions have tended to undervalue the importance of both empirical and conceptual work on the dynamics of antiracist interventions, both historically and in the present. It remains important, therefore, to develop new critical bodies of scholarship and research that address the complex question of what kinds of antiracist strategies and agendas are necessary, both generally and to meet the specific situations in different parts of the globe. This is particularly important at a time when we are witnessing the evolution and expression of new forms of racism, including opposition to migration and refugee movement, in the public sphere as well as in public political and social discourses across a wide range of societies.
It is in this volatile environment that antiracism has become the target of ideological attacks from both neo-conservative and right-wing ideologues in the contemporary period. Such attacks have sought to dismiss antiracism as an ideology that represents a threat to Western values and as a danger both to social cohesion and to the interests of the very minorities that antiracism seeks to protect and serve. While it is difficult to say that these attacks from the right speak with one voice (see, for example, Ehsan 2023; McWhorter 2021), they do provide a body of writing that needs to be addressed if we are going to be able to develop a more open scholarly and policy debate about the possibilities of developing a radical antiracism that can address the realities of racism and racial injustice in the current environment.
At the same time, part of my concern in writing this book has been to push back against the tendency, at least in scholarly and research circles, to be dismissive of the possibilities of creating a space for radical antiracist politics in contemporary societies. This is evident in a growing trend for commentators from the left to put a strong emphasis on the relative failures of antiracist policies and to argue that little has changed as a result of policies and political interventions over the past few decades that have sought to tackle racial inequalities and divisions. Indeed, some commentators seem to be arguing, rhetorically at least, that little has changed over the past centuries, let alone the past few decades (Kundnani 2023; Shafi and Nagdee 2022; Warmington 2024). This has been evident both in the public debates about mobilizations under the banner of Black Lives Matter in the US and globally, and in the controversies around immigration, race and multiculturalism that are raging in a wide range of societies. Such arguments rhetorically point to the permanence of racism in terms of structures and institutions, and in doing this they seek to highlight the limited nature of the changes that we have seen in the current conjuncture. While it is important to remain critical of what policies and mobilizations have been able to achieve in recent times, there are also evident failings in accounts that argue that little or no change has been achieved in the struggles against racism and racialized inequalities.
It is important to engage more fully with two key questions that are urgent in the contemporary environment. First, there is the question of what can be done to challenge the role of racism and racial inequalities in the societies that we live in today, rather than presuming that the only change possible is through the creation of a wholly new society at some point in the future. Second, it is also important to explore how we can develop strategies for tackling barriers to radical change both in public institutions and in the private sectors, including key financial, legal and cultural industries both nationally and globally. Both of these questions need to be addressed by more detailed research into the workings of antiracism in specific societies and in institutions if we are going to be able to develop a critical antiracism that can meet the challenges that we face in the world around us today.
The rest of this chapter will lay out some of the key arguments that frame the book as a whole. We begin by placing antiracism within the broader bodies of historical and contemporary research into racism and antiracism. This leads us into an engagement with the question about why we have seen increased interest in thinking beyond race, and the broader social and political context that has helped to shape the current discussion about the shifting understandings of antiracism in the present. The chapter concludes by providing a synoptic overview of the chapters that follow.
Before moving on to a detailed analysis of the challenges outlined above, I want to take the opportunity in the rest of this chapter to discuss the histories and evolving forms of antiracism. In doing so, we shall also need to touch on the changing histories and expressions of racism but, given the focus of this book, we shall prioritize the processes that have helped to shape the various forms of antiracism. In developing this account, our main concern will be to lay the foundations for the more detailed analysis of antiracisms in the present. But we shall begin with setting out the historical context to contemporary antiracisms.
Histories and the present
What is today called antiracism can be traced back historically through the centuries that witnessed the emergence of ideas about race and racism. A number of overviews of antiracism, both as a generalized phenomenon across different societies and as one specific to national histories, have highlighted the long history of ideas and movements that have sought to challenge racism and the embedded structures of racial domination and oppression (van Dijk 2021; Zamalin 2019). Although much of the ideological infrastructure of antiracism as a set of ideas can be traced to the period after the Holocaust and the Second World War, there are indeed much longer histories of resistance to and opposition to racism, slavery and colonial violence and domination. These histories have been carefully researched by historians and by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, particularly as a result of the growing number of scholars who have sought to give voice to the everyday forms of resistance to slavery and bondage, opposition to the violence and destruction of colonial regimes and the politics of emancipation and empowerment in the aftermath of plantation slavery (Dubois 2012; Zoellner 2020). Much of this scholarship has been carried out over the past few decades and it has helped us to develop a more nuanced and detailed understanding of these histories of resistance to racism.
The histories of opposition and resistance to racism, slavery and colonialism have not always featured in the mainstream historical scholarship, whether in relation to the Americas, Europe or other parts of the globe. Indeed, it can be argued that in many ways we have seen ongoing processes of erasure, forgetting and silence about these histories over an extended period. The work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois among others did seek to make these connections more central, but until the 1960s and 1970s such voices remained marginal to the core disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research agendas. Much of the discussion about resistance and opposition to racism came to the fore as research agendas evolved and engaged with radical forms of social theory in the period at the end of the twentieth century and into this century.
But this process of erasure and denial about the role of racism and colonialism in shaping present-day inequalities and divisions has its roots both in our histories and in contemporary processes. As Charles W. Mills has noted, a clear pattern of erasure and forgetting was part of the process of denial that was evident in many European countries both before and after empire. As he forcefully points out:
The Western European nations themselves, despite being the headquarters of empire and Atlantic slavery, and the original source of modern (and perhaps premodern) racial theory, would in the post war period begin to erase their role in establishing this global racial system. In some cases (as in ‘republican’ France) the very legitimacy of race as a social category was denied – in fact it was deleted from the constitution in 2018 – let alone ‘white supremacy’ as a defensible overarching characterization. (Mills 2020: 106)
From this perspective, it is precisely this long history of forgetting and erasing the past, particularly in relation to racism, slavery and systems of racial domination that has in turn led to a relative neglect of the complex and often messy histories of resistance and rebellion against racism that helped to shape the historical experiences of many countries through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond. Although he refers to the French context, it is also clear that this trend towards denial and erasure can be seen across many European countries with linkages to slavery and colonialism. It is a process that has involved a strange kind of silence about the long histories of racial domination that helped to shape the economic and social fabric of many European countries (Gilroy 2004; Gilroy and Oriogun-Williams 2021). With a different dynamic, there are also similar historical trends in the Americas, Africa, Australasia and beyond, where processes of enslavement and colonization have been both erased and normalized in terms of both the historical background and efforts to recover those histories for the present.
It is important to note, however, in this wider historical context, that racism as a globalized social system has often been erased not just from historical accounts but from sociological analyses of the formation and evolution of contemporary societies. As David Goldberg has noted in the context of Europe, there was an ongoing process of what he terms racial Europeanization that helped to shape the constitution of regional European models of racism linked to dominant state formations (Goldberg 2006). He argues that in this process it is often forgotten how central race was in the construction of modern Europe. Goldberg, and other scholars, have highlighted the many ways in which, despite differences, it is possible to grasp basic similarities in the ways that the histories of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, slavery and the colonial experience have been a core component in the formation of nation states and the construction of national identities and myths of origin at a global level.
From a rather different angle, Barnor Hesse has developed a related strand of analysis, suggesting that racism in the European context is located both through the notion of racism as race thinking or ideological exceptionality – for example, in relation to the Nazi use of racial theories to justify their efforts to exterminate Jewish populations in Europe – and through racism based on race relations, embodied in a Western society built on practices of racism located in the European colonial experience and slavery (Hesse 2004; 2007). For Hesse, it is precisely these twin histories of race and racism that have helped to shape much of the scholarship in this field, as well as broader societal discussions about race and prejudice in the period after the Second World War.
Other scholars have sought to situate a longer history of modes of thinking about racism and antiracism that are based on contested ideas about universalist and differentialist notions of race. Michel Wieviorka, for example, develops a version of this argument, viewing the antiracist movement both historically and in the present as fractured between those who would argue for a universalist antiracism based on reason, law and equality among all citizens, and those setting off from a differential antiracism, including public space for collective identities for particular racial and ethnic groups (Wieviorka 1995). From this perspective, this kind of tension has been at the heart of debates about antiracism throughout the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, both in terms of ideology and in the debates about what kind of policy agendas we need in order to address racial divisions and inequalities.
The broader historical background to contemporary forms of antiracism is not something that we can explore in any depth in this book. Suffice it to say, however, that the key point to be made here is that it would be wrong to assume that present-day constructions of antiracism are the only forms that it has taken. Rather, it is important to recognize that opposition to racism and the ideologies it helped to shape has been a long-standing phenomenon and it has been expressed in various forms within specific national and regional environments. This is evident in the context of the United States and Europe, but it is also an important facet of the histories of antiracism in a wider global context. There have been important and complex histories of opposition to racism and resistance through much of the period that has been shaped by European expansion and colonialism. Indeed, as will be argued in this book, we cannot fully understand the social and political forces that have shaped racialization over the past few centuries without engaging with the ways in which opposition to racism has been an integral and ongoing component of these processes.
Theorizing antiracism
Part of the challenge we face in thinking about antiracism as a concept is that it remains relatively under-theorized. There is a tendency to use the term antiracism somewhat descriptively. While racism as both concept and discourse has been the focus of extensive scholarly debate, antiracism remains mostly untheorized and neglected by scholarship on race and racism. Bonnett (2000), for example, argues that while racism and ethnic discrimination are under continuous historical and sociological examination, antiracism is often reduced to a social movement and narrowly defined as the inverse of racism. He also helpfully highlights the need to link the theorizing of antiracism to efforts to locate it both historically and in the contemporary environment to real-world examples and empirical research on the ways in which it has evolved and helped to shape efforts to counter racism in all its forms. Yet there remains a clear imbalance between the extensive bodies of scholarship on the formations of racism and the much more limited research that has sought to explore the evolution of antiracist modes of thought and practice.
Existing scholarship has highlighted the complex forms that antiracist mobilizations have taken in the past and in the contemporary environment. Research in both Europe and in the US has investigated the role of political and civil society mobilizations that seek to challenge everyday racism as well as its institutional forms (HoSang 2021; Lentin 2004b). These accounts have played an important role in helping to bring questions about antiracism more centrally into contemporary debates, both inside and outside the academic environment. But it is also important to explore the ways in which antiracism has been formed and influenced by both intellectual trends and everyday political and community-level struggles and protests. For starters, we need to remember that antiracism is not one thing, that there is no agreed-upon definition of what counts as antiracist. But what recent research has also shown us is that the agendas of antiracist movements and groups are heterogeneous and have been influenced by diverse ideological and political imaginaries in different historical periods (Fella and Ruzza 2013; O’Brien 2009; Twine and Blee 2001; Zamalin 2019). It is also crucial to bear in mind that, if we adopt a comparative analytical frame, there are important differences in the histories of antiracism in different national, regional and local environments. Yet there remains little research that has sought to explore the changing and shifting meanings of racism and antiracism from a comparative perspective. Some important research with a comparative focus has been done in recent years, but the impact of these bodies of work on the wider research communities remains to be seen (Lamont et al. 2016; Silva 2012). But such work has helped to highlight the value of moving towards a comparative analytical frame in exploring the processes that have shaped contemporary racisms and antiracisms.
Important points of reference in discussions of racism and antiracism are the various declarations made by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the period from 1950 to the 1970s (Hazard Jr. 2012; Montagu 1972). These statements were written by scientists and social scientists of various hues and were produced in the aftermath of the Holocaust and racial policies of the Nazi regime. Much of the language of the UNESCO statements on race sought to challenge racism and prejudice by highlighting arguments against biological ideas about race and promoting ideas about a common humanity. At the core of the various UNESCO statements was the need to use the authority of science to challenge and undermine notions about biological race differences. The 1950 and 1951 statements sought to argue that biological ideas about race should be replaced by ideas about difference in terms of ethnicity and culture. In articulating such ideas, the UNESCO statements drew on both the natural sciences and the social sciences, particularly anthropology, to argue for moving beyond race as biology to seeing race through the lens of the ways in which cultural and racial ideas were formed and shaped through social interaction and political cultures.
Although the UNESCO statements were not alone in popularizing such arguments, they did play an important role in reorienting scholarship, research and policy agendas towards ideas about race as a social relation. In doing so, they also became an important point of reference in antiracist politics and discourses as they developed in the period from the 1950s and 1960s onwards (Banton 1998; van Dijk 2021). This antiracist discourse, based as it was on a kind of cultural relativism, helped to shape emergent antiracist ideas and practices globally. It can also be argued that the core arguments that begin to be articulated in the UNESCO statements and in the growing bodies of social scientific knowledge in this period permeated political thinking as well as academic scholarship, and in many ways remain influential today. This is particularly evident in the rejection of biological ideas of race and the spread of ideologies that emphasized notions about a common humanity, in which race and ethnicity do not signal anything more than cultural differences and modes of identity formation.
