Alana Lentin

In our work together, going back to the mid-2000s, we have always felt that it was impossible to engage fully with the ever circulating, scavenger nature of race and racism from the narrow Anglo-American vantage point that often predominates and orients public and scholarly discussions. Especially, when attempting to think with and against race in Europe and to excavate the attempts to ‘bury it alive’ we always attempted to seek out the parallels and overlaps between contexts that attempted to portray themselves as distinct, mirroring indeed the sedimentation created by a politics of race. Reading race in France, and in particular over the last two decades Islamophobia, has been central to that work in common. In this conversation, we reflect on debates on race, coloniality and the spectre of ‘Islamo-leftism’ in the France of 2020–2021, against the backdrop of both a global pandemic and a worldwide movement against racial violence. Through this dialogue, we think about what has changed, and what remains the same, ending with a recognition of the international importance of decolonial and political antiracist politics in France and the energy they inspire in the face of the most reactionary of forces.

Contents: Wulf D. Hund: Racism in White Sociology. From Adam Smith to Max Weber - Alana Lentin: Postracial Silences. The Othering of Race in Europe - Felix Losing: From the Congo to Chicago. Robert E. Park's Romance with Racism - Les Back, Maggie Tate: Telling About Racism. W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall and Sociology's Reconstruction - Barnor He

This chapter, written by Alana Lentin, is the first discussion in the second section of the text, titled ‘Institutional Forms of Discrimination’. It assesses the implications of the adoption of various anti-racist stances by European states in the post World War II context; drawing out a range of issues associated with the paradox of anti-racist states that are maintained and legitimated by nationalist discourse.

Innocence of Muslims is a trailer in search of its film, featuring actors in search of their roles, directed by a propagandist sought by the FBI. It did eventually find its audiences, active audiences that could, in many instances, act on it without having seen it. If this kind of reaction is usually held up as evidence of censorious ignorance, in this instance it was merely adequate to the form, as the globally circulated trailer was conceived with relatively firm expectations of its viewers and witnesses. Posted on YouTube during July 2012 by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian who used the pseudonym ‘Sam Bacile’ — what has become known as the Innocence of Muslims exists for the vast majority of its audience as a 14-minute pastiche, The Real Life of Muhammad, a ‘trailer’ for an unverified full-length movie called The Innocence of Bin Laden allegedly screened in Hollywood during June 2012.

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.

En interrogeant la tendance post-raciale à la despécification du racisme par la prolifération d’expériences minorées, l’article propose d’analyser, dans une perspective de théorie critique, comment l’« éliminativisme racial » qui sous-tend les projets post-racialistes, a cristallisé en des formes particulières de déni racial que nous étudions à travers la figure contemporaine du non-racisme. À la différence de l’anti-racialisme qui discute la pertinence des catégorisations raciales comme facteur d’analyse sociale et politique, le non-racisme se caractérise par une manière de (re)définir le racisme qui met à distance ou « déréalise » la race en tant que, à la fois, phénomène historique et expérience vécue, d’une part ; s’ancre sur la primauté de perspectives morales, d’autre part. Trois facettes seront plus particulièrement étudiées : l’opposition postulée entre race et classe ; l’« inutilité » contemporaine présumée du racisme comme schème explicatif ; l’antiracisme comme un combat des « élites ».

Focussing on the postracial drive to undermine racism through its purported universalization, the paper is aimed at analyzing, from a critical race studies perspective, how the ‘racial eliminativist’ demands, that underlie postracialist projects, paradoxically, crystallize into new forms of racial deniability, which I study through the contemporary expressions of ‘not racism’. Thus the argument is not about the existence of race as a factor determining social and political relations, hence ‘anti-racialism’, but rather about the establishment of definitions of racism that either sideline or deny race both as an historical phenomenon and as experienced by racialised people, on the one hand ; push for a dominant interpretation of racism as a moral one which sutures it to assessments of individual character, on the other hand. Three key facets of this ‘not racism’ will be put under scrutiny : the tendency to oppose race and class ; the alleged ‘unhelpfulness’ of racism; and the so called ‘elitism’ of antiracism.

Smartphone apps for anti-racism education and intervention are being devel- oped by organisations in various countries. The ubiquity of smartphone use and app methodology, as Grant argues, have the potential to disrupt racial knowl- edges and facilitate anti-racist action. I use Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ‘zones of appear- ance and non-appearance’ and Derek Hook’s discussion of ‘racialising embodiment’ to discuss the potential of one such app, Everyday Racism, to challenge and disrupt white supremacy. The Australian-based app uses gamifica- tion to encourage users to participate in ‘bystander anti-racism’. However, by failing to question the neutrality of the default white bystander, the app risks reproducing hegemonic constellations of white agency versus racialized inaction. I argue that, in the zone of appearance, it is not enough to make racism apparent. It is necessary to appear. To appear first requires exposing nonappearance including the role even of the well-intentioned in maintaining it.

The call for a parsing of the French context that accompanied the aftermath of the attacks on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo mobilized what Barnor Hesse calls a “white analytics.” Such a partial vision of France as “exceptional” in matters of race denies the significance of “black analytics” for a full understanding of the context leading up to the Charlie Hebdo “event.” “White analytics” permits the universalization of racism and the suggestion that “reverse racism” or “Islamic leftism” are now dominant. In contrast, attention to the work of scholars and activists who shed light on race and ongoing coloniality in France is vital for the significant challenges of the present to be fully understood, paving the way for a renewal of a radical “political antiracism.”

While the idea that racism is accompanied by its denial is well established, this paper examines the widespread explicit advocacy of a stance of ‘not racism’. The rejection of racism by proponents of positions that hinder the cause of racial justice is the discursive next step in ‘postracial’ racism. I examine the various ways in which racism has been proposed to be an ‘unhelpful’ framework. I make the case that the dominant position within philosophy of race that racism is, first and foremost, a moral failing has unwittingly contributed to the emergence of ‘not racism’ as a dominant expression in race thinking today. Following an examination of several key moral philosophical analyses of racism, I illustrate my argument that ‘not racism’ is a form of racist violence with reference to several recent and contemporary cases against the backdrop of the rise of ‘Global Trumpism’.

This paper examines the themes of 'casual racism', 'bystander antiracism' and 'ordinariness' in some recent scholarship on racism in Australia. I argue that these approaches acknowledge, but fail to engage deeply, with the legacies of colonialism and black subjugation for understandings of racism today, and that they rely on a centering of 'white comfort' as a strategy of antiracism. In contrast, the paper reflects on elements of Black thought in order to decentre such 'white analytics', making the case that 'thinking blackly' about race and racism in Australia would bring about what Lewis Gordon calls more truthful, and hence more politically useful, accounts.

In an article on race and British cultural studies, Roxy Harris noted that the field’s founders – E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams – ignored “the place of black and brown British subjects in the national polity”. Thompson’s classic 1968 study, The Making of the English Working Class, for example, while covering “topics such as the liberty of ‘the free-born Englishman’” was silent about “the part played by the Empire, the slaves, plantations, the East India Company and so on”.

These great theorists of British society were race-blind.

But it seems that little has been learned from this partial and parochial view of British social and economic history, especially in the writings of a small but vocal group from what we will refer to as “the white Left”.

'I know the whole House will want to join me in marking Holocaust Memorial Day. It is right our whole country should stand together to remember the darkest hour of humanity. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I said we would build a striking national memorial in London to show the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust. Today I can tell the House this memorial will be built in Victoria Tower Gardens. It will stand beside Parliament as a permanent statement of our values as a nation and will be something for our children to visit for generations to come.”

British Prime Minister, David Cameron, 27 January 2016

So began Prime Minister’s Question Time on Holocaust Memorial Day 2016 in the British Parliament. Later, in response to the Leader of the Opposition’s questions, Cameron rejoindered that, far from standing up for ‘the British people and hard-working taxpayers’, Jeremy Corbyn ‘met with a bunch of migrants in Calais [and] said they could all come to Britain.’ Many were quick to point out the cruel irony of his dismissive statement moments after his commitment to ensure the memory of the Holocaust never be forgotten. As Joseph Harker pointed out in The Guardian, ‘one couldn’t help but wonder whether, if Cameron had been around in the 1930s, he would have laughed about “a bunch of Jews”.’
- See more at: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14225#sthash.VHCUC2Hg.dpuf

Focusing on the chapters by Brett St Louis, Michael Banton, Matthew Hughey, and David Goldberg, I explore the contribution of Murji and Solomos’ volume, Theories of Race and Ethnicity, to ongoing debates on the meaning of the post-racial. I draw on Goldberg’s interactive relationality as a means for thinking about the continued significance of race both for scholarship on its
material effects and for developing practices of anti-racism.

The attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January 2015, during which fourteen people were killed, pose a specific problem for the white left. The call to contextualize Charlie Hebdo foregrounded a structurally white French context, in which people of colour and Muslims could be included only as loyal subjects of the Republic. The translations of France offered by French and Francophile leftists for their “Anglo-American” interlocutors, while revealing of the French dynamics of secularism, universalism, and coloniality, marginalised those “who could not be Charlie.” Instead, to use Barnor Hesse’s formulation, a “white analytics” was advanced that denied the centrality of the “black analytics” crucial for a complete understanding of both historical and contemporary French conflicts around race and religion (Hesse 2014). “Context,” therefore, stand in for racial neutrality: in reality, an impossibility.

L'article récent d'Houria Bouteldja du Parti des indigènes de la république, « Racisme(s) et philosémitisme d'État », tentait d'éclairer le récit national autour de l'antisémitisme à travers le soutien occidental à l'État d'Israël. Ce texte a suscité plusieurs réactions dans la gauche radicale et entre en écho avec un débat encore en cours autour du philosémitisme. Nous publions ici une réaction de la sociologue des discriminations Alana Lentin, qui évoque son expérience de juive antisioniste pour condamner le philosémitisme d'État.

Given recent concerns with racism in France following the Charlie Hebdo attacks on January 2015, I revisited some of the segments on anti-racism in France from my 2004 book, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe. The contemporary analyses of French approaches to race would have done well to revisit the histories I examined in that book based on research carried out in 1999-2000. These segments are not the totality of everything related to France in that book, but I hope they will give readers the impetus to take a look at the book’s argument again with fresh eyes.

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

This paper will be published as part of a Symposium on Michael Banton's reflections on the work of John Rex in Ethnic and racial Studies.

The paper examines racism’s ‘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 an overemphasis of what race is taken to be, rather than of what it does. Confusion over how to formulate antiracism is based on this misconception of race at the core of much antiracist thought, leading to an obscuration of racism. Critically examining some contemporary antiracist activity, I briefly assess the role played by those who challenge racism in legitimizing or negating official interpretations of racism in contemporary Australia.

Abstract: This paper argues that mainstream sociological research into ‘migration, ethnicity, and minorities’ (MEM) elides, neglects, or denies the role of race in the construction of the boundaries of Europeanness. Relying on an analysis of the work of established scholars in the field, I argue that their dominance marginalises a race critical approach that is attentive to the persistence of coloniality in contemporary raciologies. Inherent in their work is a splitting off of race from racism that is based on a foundational postracialism according to which racism, a Eurocentric concept, could never encompass a reading of the centrality of race - as a technology for the management of human life first worked out in the colonies - to European politics and sociality. Racism, therefore, remains an external force that can only be treated as pathological and as antithetical to Europe’s vision of itself as the pinnacle of liberalism and universalism.

Despite the resistance from radical antiracist formations, autonomously organised by racialized minorities and migrants themselves, that can be witnessed in many spaces, the success with which antiracism has been both appropriated and relativized by the state as well as hegemonic activist voices poses a significant threat. The politics of diversity and the consensus around the notion that western societies are post-race contribute to portraying the critique of racism from people of colour as inaccurate, alienating and counter-productive to the achievement of social cohesion. The necessity of dismantling the idea of race as suggested by antiracist activists and scholars has been subverted in the deconstruction of the experience of racism by an ‘antiracialist’—rather than a more radical antiracist—agenda intent on relativizing the struggle against racism as one among many. The consequence of this in the context of postracialism is for racism itself to be departicularized and dissociated from its historical roots. Antiracism needs to reclaim the risk, that Goldberg argues is inherent to it, and rescue it from being universalised into meaninglessness.

Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Regarded as the failed experiment of liberal elites, commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies; parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national ‘ways of life’ and universal values. In beautifully belligerent writing, this unique and important new book forcefully challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by refuting the existence of a coherent era of ‘multiculturalism’ in the first place.

After an inspiring foreword by Guardian-journalist Gary Younge, the authors argue that what we are witnessing is not so much a rejection of multiculturalism as a rejection of lived multiculture. In documenting mainstream racism and the anxieties that inform it, Lentin and Titley show that the crisis is a projection of neoliberal societies’ disjunctures. This book combines theory with a reading of contemporary events and argues that challenging this notion provides activists with a chance to ultimately transcend resurgent racism.
Review

Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley offer a powerful and persuasive account of how multiculturalism has been sentenced to death. Drawing on a vast array of sources, voices and examples, they show how laments on the failure of multiculturalism create a political and affective landscape in which racism is simultaneously repudiated and reproduced. A necessary and important book.
- Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College

This book provides a rich and scholarly analysis of the multiple forces at play in the construction of the ‘death of multiculturalism’ as a flexible and potent political discourse. Incisive and provocative in it’s analysis; it is uncomfortable reading for those on both the left and right in politics. This is necessary reading for anyone concerned with the complex masking of racism within the rhetorical dance of national identities and globalized neo-liberal ideologies.
- Professor Charles Husband, Centre for Applied Social Research, University of Bradford.

The Crises of Multiculturalism critically examines the entanglements inherent in the broad range of European multiculturalisms today, their “loud” rejection and yet a melancholic neediness expressed in their bemoaning. The analysis is especially incisive about the ways in which an “era of integration,” as multiculturalism’s contemporary expression, seeks insecurely to assert authoritative control and security in the face of threatening and fearful expressions of a burgeoning multiculture supposedly marking European nations. The authors reveal how the politics of multiculturalism continue to structure, reproduce, and render less visible contemporary racisms.Those concerned to understand the synchrony of multiculturalism, integration, and revitalized racisms across the European landscape would do well to consult this book.’

- Professor David Theo Goldberg, University of California

Lentin & Titley’s fierce critique provides a much-needed critical analysis of multiculturalism’s ineffectuality in opposing the racism rising in Europe today. The smiling rhetoric of tolerance, we learn here, is still produced by sharp white teeth. Highly recommended.

- Howard Winant, Center for New Racial Studies, University of California

‘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.

Despite the long struggle to eliminate racism, it is still very much with us. In fact, since 9/11, racism appears to be on the rise, making it more important than ever before to understand the meaning of race and the effect it has on society.

Alana Lentin maps the emergence and development of ideas about race through political history right up to modern debates about multiculturalism and Islamophobia, and considers the implications of a 'post-racial' society at a time when science has placed genetics over culture. Provocative and intelligent reading for the newcomer and expert alike, this invaluable resource exposes the roots of racial thought and demonstrates why it has remained crucial to our everyday lives.

"I've learned an enormous lot from Lentin's book. I only regret that a guide like this was not in existence when sixty years ago I started to study that phenomenon, one of the most insidious and complex of our times. My long struggle to comprehend its causes and poisonous logic would have been so much easier to wage – and win."
Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds

"This book brings some valuable clarity into a theme that often generates a lot of confusion. Alana Lentin shows that there is nothing natural or inevitable about racism."
Stephen Castles, Director and Senior Researcher at IMI and Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies at the University of Oxford

"This is a lively, accessible and up to date introduction that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the impact of racism in the West today."
Alastair Bonnett, Professor of Social Geography at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

"Clearly and convincingly written, the book is especially effective in positioning the political stakes of contemporary racisms. Alana Lentin offers a very good springboard from which students can launch a critical examination of racisms."
David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute

"An excellent and up to date introduction to one of the world's most enduring forms of injustice.  Racism's shifting form and anatomy is dissected with precision offering a much needed political and sociological analysis."
Les Back, Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College

"This is a provocative and stimulating book which deserves to be widely read. While at times the book makes for uncomfortable reading, Lentin’s sharp insights into the 'inherently political nature of racism' provides a major contribution to the study of racism in contemporary society."
Elaine Moriarty, lecturer in sociology at Trinity College, Dublin

"Provides a perceptive and accessible overview both of the history of racism and of its contemporary forms… An outstanding choice for course adoption across the social sciences and humanities."
Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara

'Diversity' has become a key term in contemporary social politics, and is often used as both a description of complex social realities and a normative prescription for how those realities should be valued, influenced by the politics of multiculturalism and by social movements asserting "the right to be different" diversity has emerged as an open, fluid discourse that challenges reductive visions of legitimate identities and human possibilities. It is this apparent acceptance of diversity as a fact and value that this book sets out to examine, in a range of ways, it offers a countervailing assessment of 'diversity'; seeing it less as a unifying social imaginary and more as a cost-free form of politics attuned to the needs of late capitalist, consumer societies. The introduction distinguishes between 'diversity polities' - emerging from a range of critiques of social power - and the 'politics of diversity', a depoliticised celebration of difference that replicates the problems of multiculturalism without the benefits of the overt ideological engagement that multiculturalism has provoked.The essays collected here are developed from a research seminar entitled "Diversity, Human Rights and Participation" organised by the Partnership on Youth between the Council of Europe and the European Commission. The studies gathered here are embedded in 10 different national contexts. They track dimensions of 'diversity' in education, social services, jurisprudence, parliamentary proceedings and employment initiatives, and assess their significances for the social actors who must negotiate these frameworks in their daily experience.

Speaking about racism in the western political climate of the first decade of the twenty-first century is more difficult than ever before. There is a feeling in post-colonial and post-immigration societies that the blatant overt racism of the past is no longer as pressing. Admitting racism elicits discomfort because common wisdom tells us that racism opposes everything that we believe in as citizens of democratic, civilised modern states. Yet state racism appears to be here to stay and, in many ways, is more acceptable than ever before. Immigration detention centres, the deportation of failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, racial profiling and the rolling back of liberties won by the civil rights movement are all examples of how state racism impacts on our daily lives. Race and State contributes to breaking the taboo of discussing the links between race and state. The papers collected in this book highlight the interconnections between race and state, from historical, theoretical or contemporary sociological perspectives. Part I of the book looks at theoretical issues in conceptualising the race -state relationship. Part II examines racism in its most pernicious contemporary manifestation: the racialisation of terror . Part III, on the racial state(s) of Ireland, is an important addition to the debate, examining Ireland as a test case for demonstrating and interpreting the relationship between race and state.

'Two Irish social scientists Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley undertake to do precisely this in their truly useful new book The Crisis of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (Zed Books, 2011).  And when I term the book as “useful”, I mean to say it is one of those rare books that are a weapon for struggle.'

Routledge have republished Paul Gilroy’s 2000 Between Camps in accompaniment to his 2004 offering, After Empire, a book-length essay that, in part, attempts to apply the theorization made in Between Camps to the contemporary British context. It is of interest to note that the US edition of the earlier book was entitled The End of Race, a title that attempted to simplify the kernel of Gilroy’s argument. Both of the books reviewed here may
indeed be said to be centred around what for Gilroy has become a central question: whether ‘race’ has expended its political utility for the anti-racist project and asking instead, in what other terms this struggle may be couched. However, Gilroy displays an ambivalent stance on the issue, arguing for an end to ‘race’ but never really providing sufficiently convincing arguments in support of his case.

In the midst of student disquiet vocalised through campaigns running across the UK that ask ‘why is my curriculum white?’, this book which poses to interrogate the relationship between Racism and Sociology offers a timely intervention. Taking its cue from the well-noted point long made amongst race scholars concerning the marginalisation of W.E.B. DuBois within the discipline when compared with the more established ‘founding fathers’ of Weber and Durkheim, this collection sets out to demonstrate how the development of Sociology has been culpable in institutionalising the racial project. The book's important contribution to the field lies in its interrogation, not simply of the failure of mainstream sociological analyses to recognise how racial structures order social relations, but in its grappling with the ways in which racism has underpinned theoretical developments of the social question.

Alexander Weheliye’s 2014 book, Habeas Viscus is a vital critique of two dominant accounts of the limits and contours of humanity: Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. But beyond providing us with a much needed problematisation of these two theories, what they omit, and the Eurocentrisms they reproduce, this book offers much more. In fact, despite the book’s framing around the critique of bare life and biopolitics, Habeas Viscus in my reading is really a call to see race – and thus the concept of the human – otherwise and a rallying call for Black thought and its centrality for making sense of modernity. Alexander Weheliye, a professor of African-American studies, is primarily a cultural-literary theorist/philosopher. His points of reference and his lyrical, evocative but dense writing style are harder for sociologists to access. Nevertheless, his insistence on placing Black feminist thought at the heart of this theorization of race, the human and the ‘possibilities of other worlds’ (Weheliye 2014: 2) means that there is a lot that race critical students interested in the function of race but also the constant possibility of self-emancipation in the face of its structuring constraints can learn from his groundbreaking book.

Lisa Lowe‘s 2015 book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is the impetus for this week’s blog, the fifth in my Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology series. This groundbreaking work challenges us to unread standard accounts of the development of capitalist modernity and political liberalism. It does not do this only by inserting race, gender and the colonial in order to disrupt these standard accounts. While this work is vital, Lisa Lowe goes several steps further. She reorients official histories by reading the archives against each other and juxtaposes this archaeological work with an unreading of standard texts from literature, autobiography and political philosophy. The Intimacies of Four Continents is not the kind of book that sociologists are used to reading, but neither is it a standard work of history, literature or philosophy as it is profoundly interdisciplinary. The book is an example par excellence of what a relational, interactive or connected account looks like, taking us several steps deeper into the discussion, begun in blogs 3 and 4, about the methodological and epistemological challenges of doing sociology with a truly global orientation.

This is the third contribution to the Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology blog series. In it I look at the argument advanced  by David Theo Goldberg (2009) that a relational approach to the study of race and racism reveals more than a comparativist approach does. I propose, however, that before being able to discuss the relative adequacy of either approach, we must have a good understanding of what is being researched when we centre race in accounts of historical or contemporary social, political and economic processes.

It has become a problem to identify that racism has been made to play a role in how austerity is framed – as a struggle between the deserving native and the undeserving, undesirable yet desiring migrant. This conveniently ignores the detrimental effects that the mobilisation of race, and sexualised race in particular, has on achieving the societies we need, in which there is enough for all.

Underlying Bernard Keane’s article – ‘“Let them all come” is “stop the boats” for progressives’ – is a deep sense of indignation about the idea that Australians are racist. The oft-repeated argument is that elitist, disconnected, latte-sippers tut-tut over ‘Bogan’ racism, serving to displace the problem. So far so uninteresting. What this leads to is largely meaningless tit for tats between white people, stultifying crucial debates to be had about refugee policy. The focus is narrowed to disagreements over the purpose of the Left that fail to focus on the issue at hand. Paradoxically, the key thing that Keane admonishes left-liberal handwringers for is deflecting a focus on policy by prioritising unworkable ideals, such as ‘let them all come’. However, articles that themselves do not suggest concrete responses to the (manufactured) ‘refugee crisis’ and merely tell others off for failing to do the same are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

A talk given at the Somatechnics Conference, Byron Bay, December 2016.

As Jessie Daniels (2013) shows, just as race is both embedded in and afforded by technology in general, it is encoded in the infrastructure, design and interface of the Internet. The burgeoning study of the relationship between race and digital technology (cf. Nakamura 2008, Nakamura and Chow White 2012, Noble 2014, Sharma 2013, etc.) has not as yet focused greatly on the role of mobile app technology. While this gap can be explained by the relative nascence of the everyday use of smart phones, this is a field in need of urgent research given the significance of embodiment to racialization.

As Farman notes, physical space is being altered as we continuously locate ourselves ‘simultaneously in digital space and in material space’ as a result of ubiquitous mobile phone use (Farman (2012: 17). How then is racial embodiment enhanced, affected or disturbed by the phone in our pockets?

Based on a long-term commitment to researching race from the perspective of antiracism (Lentin 2004), this paper examines the role played by the growing number of antiracism mobile apps on the relationship between race, embodiment and digital technology. Based on empirical research with the developers of a number of different apps for antiracism intervention or education in three countries, I argue that these mobile apps potentially make it possible to place digitally constituted ideas of race in confrontation with their materially located effects. How one responds to a racist incident might increasingly be a function of how race is interpreted in the design of antiracism apps. This raises important questions for the designers of the increasing number of antiracism apps being developed in light of the rise in race hate crime and the awareness of racist policing. It also invites us to consider the effects of the imbrication of race in digital technology in embodied space, and the impact of how race is variably represented digitally upon antiracism action beyond the screen.

On April 7, I was invited to participate in a round table on ‘Free Speech and Religious Freedom after Charlie Hebdo and Section 18C’ at the University of Wollongong by Tanja Dreher and Michael Griffiths on the occasion of Anshuman Mondal‘s visit to the University. Here are the slides from my brief presentation which touched on recent events in France and made an attempt to connect them to issues arising from the theorisation of the postracial.  also gave a response to Mondal’s lecture, ‘Freedom of Expression and Religious Freedom in Contemporary Multiculture’, the text of which I reproduce here.