Alana Lentin

Racism and anti-racism in Europe

‘Remarkable ... a major contribution to our understanding and handling of one of the crucial contemporary issues that acquires more gravity by the day.’ Zygmunt Bauman This is an in-depth sociological study of the phenomenon of anti-racism, as both political discourse and social movement practice in western Europe. Lentin develops a comparative study of anti-racism in Britain, France, Italy and Ireland. While ‘race’ and racism have been submitted to many profound analyses, anti-racism has often been dealt with as either the mere opposite of racism or as a theme for prescriptives or polemics by those concerned with the persistence of racist discrimination. By contrast, this book views anti-racism as a variety of discourses that are central to the understanding of the politics of modern states. Examining anti-racism gives us insights not only into current debates on citizenship, immigration and Europeanisation, but it also crucially assists us in understanding the nature of race, racism and racialisation themselves. At a time of mounting state racism against asylum seekers, migrants and refugees throughout Europe and beyond, this book provides a much-needed exploration of the discourse of anti-racism that shapes policy and public opinion today.

Post-race, post politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism

Declarations of the end of race ignore the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality in ‘racial states’. Nevertheless, the idea of post-racialism has gained ground in a post-9/11 era, defined by a growing suspicion of diversity. Clearly racialized, this suspicion is couched in cultural-civilizational terms that attempt to avoid the charge of racism. Hence, attempts to counteract the purported failure of multiculturalism in Europe today pose culturalist solutions to problems deemed to originate from an excess of cultural diversity. This is part of a deepening culturalization of politics in which the post-race argument belongs to a post-political logic that shuns political explanations of unrest and widening disintegration in favour of reductive culturalist ones. The culturalization of politics is elaborated by relating it to the displacement of the political that originated with the nineteenth-century ascendance of race, thus setting ‘post-racialism’ firmly within the history of modern racism.

Replacing "race": historicising the "culture" in multiculturalism

ABSTRACT Lentin sets out to unravel the history of the discourse of culturalism in the post-Second World War period. Culture is now almost universally used to categorize distinct human groups and to refer to the differences between them. As the liberal acceptance of multiculturalism as a recipe for contemporary living affirms, the use of culture as a viable conceptualization of human difference often goes unchallenged in present-day scholarship. Lentin focuses on how the concept of ‘culture’ came to replace the language of ‘race’ in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Looking at the history of the ‘UNESCO tradition’ of anti-racism, she shows how racial categorizations were replaced by cultural distinctions as a means of explaining human difference. Whereas ‘race’ was seen as irrevocably invoking the superiority of some human groups over others, culture was assumed by anti-racist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to imply a positive celebration of difference while allowing for the possibility for progress among groups once considered ‘primitive’. Lentin argues that such a shift, on which the western discourse of anti-racism is grounded, by merely replacing ‘race’ with ‘culture’, fails to expunge the ranking of humanity implied by theories of ‘race’. The essentialization of ‘cultures’ inherent within this cultural relativism is carried through into multicultural approaches to education, policymaking and activism that fail to include the dominant group in their schematization of contemporary social and political relations. Furthermore, the failure of culturalist approaches to counter racism effectively has been attributed to the purported identity politics of ‘minority groups’. Contrary to the notion that culture has come to pervade politics due to a bottom-up call from the marginalized for greater recognition of their cultural ‘authenticity’, Lentin shows how culturalism originated within the anti-racist elite and has resulted in the depoliticization of anti-racism of the racisms actual targets.

The crisis of ‘multiculturalism’ in Europe: Mediated minarets, intolerable subjects:

During the last decade, European countries have declared a ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism. This crisis has gained significant political traction, despite the empirical absence of a failed experiment with multiculturalism. This introduction focuses on the narrative of multicultural backlash, which purports that ‘parallel societies’ and ‘intolerable subjects’ and practices have been allowed to flourish within European societies. Beyond particular contexts, the problem of intolerable subjects is seen as a shared European challenge, requiring disintegrated migrants and Muslim populations to display loyalty, adopt ‘our’ values, and prove the legitimacy of their belonging. This introduction critiques multicultural backlash, less as a rejection of piecemeal multicultural policies than as a denial of lived multiculture. This is developed through an examination of racism in a post-racial era, and by analysing the ways in which integrationist projects further embed culturalist ontology.

Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses: Picking holes in ‘culture’ and ‘human rights’

This article seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream anti-racist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand, and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potential solutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to cope with racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social structures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize ‘race’. Racism is treated as an individual attitude born of prejudice and ignorance and not as a political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy of modernity and a questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism is necessary in the current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

Racism in public or public racism: doing anti-racism in ‘post-racial’ times

ABSTRACT The paper examines racisms ‘debatability’ by looking at the interpellation of public acts of racism. The idea of racism as an event appears crucial to the judgment of its legitimacy. By examining racism as a disjointed series of public events that are often accompanied by elisions of the connections between racist ‘eruptions’ and systemic conditions, I shine light on what is meant by racism today. Racism can be theorized dually as both frozen and motile. This is due to emphasis being placed on what race is taken to be, rather than on what it does. Confusion over how to formulate anti-racism is based on this misconception of race at the core of much anti-racist thought, leading to an obscuration of racism. Critically examining some contemporary anti-racist activity, I briefly assess the role played by those who challenge racism in legitimizing or negating official interpretations of racism in contemporary Australia.

What does race do

In writing on ‘John Rexs Main Mistake’, Michael Banton reveals more about Banton than he does about Rex. I use Bantons discussion of the differences between his own and John Rexs ‘mistakes’ to explore why, in my view, race continues to have analytical purchase in a purportedly ‘post-racial’ age

Structure, Strategy, Sustainability: What Future for New Social Movement Theory?

The theoretical domain developed for the study of New Social Movements (NSMs) in the early 1980s has recently been largely abandoned by its main advocates. Increasingly, the cross-class, ‘post-materialist’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s, typified by the issues of environment, peace and feminism, cease to pose a radical challenge to contemporary western politics. This paper revisits the theoretical work of three of the European voices central to understandings of the emergence and success of New Social Movements. Claus Offe, Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine succeed in amalgamating an essential emphasis on structural transformation and an understanding of the importance of identity in bringing about ‘new’ collective action in the 1970s and 1980s. In response, to the significant decrease in European work on the NSM phenomenon today the paper proposes that the existing body of theory may be insufficient for describing collective action at the turn of the Millennium. The increasing predominance of ‘identity’ politics (e.g. in the realms of ethnicity and sexuality) in the arenas previously dominated by ‘universalist’, post-particularist themes; the institutionalisation of elements of NSM action and concerns; and the perceived appropriation by transnational agencies of the issues dominating original state-NSM struggles are cited as reasons for the need to develop a new language to describe contemporary collective action phenomena.

Racism, anti-racism and the Western state

Racism and ethnic discriminations are under continuous historical and sociological examination. But anti-racism is consigned to the status of a ‘cause’, fit only for platitudes of support or denouncement. Bonnett 2000: 2 In his book, Anti-Racism , Alastair Bonnett points out the paucity of research into anti-racism. Indeed, the discourse and political practice of anti-racism has generally been considered to be the mere opposite of racism, and as such undeserving of specific attention. In this chapter, I argue that, contrary to such a view, understanding anti-racism is central to making sense of ‘race’ and racism in the West since the Second World War. The end of the last World War and the full unveiling of the Nazi ‘final solution’ is a key moment in this regard. In the years that followed, anti-racist scientists and thinkers developed explanations for racism and proposed solutions for combating its persistence. These precepts formed the backbone of the approach to racism, or the more acceptably termed ‘discrimination’, taken by governments, supranational institutions and ‘mainstream’ groups in civil society, such as trade unions, church and solidarity organizations. The argument I make concerns western Europe generally: although national contexts and their varying histories of colonialism and immigration all differ, official discourses generally offer a similar interpretation of racism. According to this interpretation, racism is a perversion of the logical course of modern politics that comes to affect western political culture from beyond the pale.

Antiracism apps: framing understandings and approaches to antiracism education and intervention

ABSTRACT Mobile apps for antiracism have become valuable pedagogical and activist tools for their real-time and mapping capabilities, their portability and intimate bodily presence, which enables a reaction exactly when an act of racism occurs. In this article, five mobile apps aimed at producing antiracism education or intervention outcomes from the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the focus of an interrogation of the ways in which racism and antiracism are framed and the strengths and weaknesses of these initiatives for countering dominant forms of everyday racism. We identify a number of different approaches to racism and antiracism in our inquiry, which lead to particular sets of aims, features and uses: the app as a tool for capturing, reporting and responding to racist acts; as a way of reinforcing a wider sense of community identity and solidarity; to demonstrate racism, especially Islamophobia, and make its forms visible, and as a means for challenging racism through raising awareness and encouraging bystanders to oppose it. We argue that while these apps are well disposed to exposing and manifesting isolated incidents of racism in everyday life, we question their potential for transformative societal outcomes beyond the level of unilateral action in the context of events experienced as unique incidents.