Alana lentin.net

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I would have headed this ‘rich Indians’ good, because of course the point is not that all Indians will suddenly be welcomed to Britain with open arms, but I don’t get to decide about the headlines!

In The End of Tolerance, Arun Kundnani argues that the ability to integrate in today’s Britain is based less on how you look and more on whether or not you are deemed culturally compatible. This may seem like progress but the sliding scale along which humanity is now organised is not unlike the racial hierarchies of old; it’s just less colour-coded. So, an English-educated Indian professional may be more acceptable than a white, jobless Bulgarian or Romanian. This is exactly on point as we witness David Cameron’s rush to India, a country whose economic rise he described as “one of the great phenomena of the century”. Read more on The Guardian website

An article I wrote with Valerie Amiraux on the plan to take the word ‘race’ out of the French constitution.

It’s become something of a commonplace to speak of the US as having entered a post-racial age. Both the right and the left have heralded the end of race, either triumphantly or as a way of dismissing talk of racism as so much political correctness. However, in Europe, the debate about race – post- or otherwise – is virtually non-existent compared with North America, where race never really goes away as a topic no matter how much people wish it would. Which is why it is surprising that the issue has become a significant part of François Hollande’s term in office. During the French presidential elections last spring, the Socialist candidate pledged to remove the word “race” from the French constitution. Currently, it states that “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It guarantees equality before the law for all citizens without distinction of origin, race or religion.” He is promising to effect that change before the summer. Read more on The Guardian website

Luqman Onikosi

An article published in The Guardian on January 25, 2012. Please read, share and sign the petition to help keep Luqman Onikosi in the UK. Trigger warning: the comments after this article are particularly harsh for the main part. Please do not read them if you are affected by any of the issues concerned.

Theresa May’s decision to deport a seriously ill Nigerian man after university puts Britain’s ethics to the test.

In early 2008, a very energetic young man bounded into my office in the sociology department of Sussex University. Words tumbling from his mouth faster than he could say them, he hovered above the seat on which students generally sat, a glint of excitement in his eyes. Extremely courteous – almost deferent – he introduced himself as Luqman Onikosi, a first-year student from Nigeria… Read more on the Guardian website…

I attended the Race, Sexuality and Rights Workshop at the University of Sydney yesterday, December 10. The event was organised by Dinesh Wadiwel and featured a talk by Jasbir Puar who was visiting Australia to attend the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association conference which starts in Adelaide today.

The participants were called upon to read two papers by Puar, one more theoretical which discusses the interrelationship between intersectionality and assemblage theory, and the second on pinkwashing and pinkwatching in relation to Israel-Palestine published in Jaddaliya. These papers and some wider issues around them were discussed in four fascinating interventions by Ihab Shalbak, Gilbert Caluya, Regrette Etcetera, and Angela Mitropoulos. Read the rest of this entry »

I shall be the guest of the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights a the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada between October 31 and November 3. Please join me if you can at a debate on multiculturalism, during which I will be talking about The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age (my book with Gavan Titley) being organised at the Edmonton Clinic Health Academy // Room 2-490 on November 1 at 17h00. I look forward to meeting you there.

I will be speaking on Good and Bad Diversity: The Crises of Multiculturalism as a Crisis of Politics at the Institute for Cultural and Society, University of Western Sydney, Room EB.2.21, Building EB, UWS Parramatta campus, corner James Ruse Drive and Victoria Road, Rydalmere (RSVP: ics@uws.edu.au)

I am also delighted to be launching Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West by George Morgan and Scott Poynting just beforehand. All Welcome.

The latest article, by Gavan Titley and myself, part of the Guardian’s series on Racism in a Digital Age which includes articles by Gary Younge and Mehdi Hasan.

Not long after he was Photoshopped picking crops in a field by Paolo Ciani, a councillor for the rightwing Italian Future and Liberty party, the footballer Mario Balotelli was subject to a further visual “tribute” from Gazzetto dello Sport. While Ciani sneered at Balotelli’s “migrant” background, the Gazzetto’s King Kong cartoon can be placed in an established history of racist stereotypes. In the ensuing criticism, the paper admitted it should have shown better taste, but rejected accusations of racism. Read more on The Guardian’s site…

Valerie Amiraux and I published an article on French Presidential elections Socialist Candidate, Francois Hollande’s plan to take the word ‘race’ out of the French constitution. The ful version of the article, reproduced below, was republished by the Les Mots Sont Importants Website. The Le Monde version was entitled, Retirer le mot « race » de la Constitution ne règle rien, and is an edited version of the full article.

My 2008 book, Racism: A Beginner’s Guide has been brought out in audio version. Listen to an excerpt (it’s surprisingly easy on the ear!) here

My latest article has been published ‘Online First’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies.

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.