I will be giving a talk titled ‘Against Definitions’ based on the fifth chapter of my new book, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy, at Manchester University on 22 April, live and online.
The first attack is an attack on culture. Marx refused to accept the terms, the language, the conceptualizations of the society which he was addressing. He could not accept them because he understood them to be distortions, because he understood them to be very pointed, very clearly related to distortions, to the oppression of a people’ (Robinson 2019: 71).
In my new book, The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy I build on Cedric J. Robinson’s concept of the racial regime (Robinson 2007), the ensemble of histories, theories, hypotheses, studies, representations and lies which assist the recalibration of racial capitalism.
In Chapter 5, ‘Against Definitions’, I analyse the usages of the ‘war on antisemitism’ (Younes 2020) for the new racial regime. Counterinsurgent definitions of antisemitism, most prominently the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism (IHRA-WDA), impose what Robinson called an official ‘meaning of things’ (Robinson 2000). Although cloaked in the language of antiracism, such definitions are always mechanisms of control, because they are not popular demands, but institutional constraints.
To elaborate on this, I discuss Robinson’s essay, ‘The First Attack is an Attack on Culture’ in which he discusses Karl Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’.
I read the emphasis currently being placed on ‘Jewish safety’ in the context of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, as a response to a critique of Zionism through Issar et al’s theorisation of the ‘primitive accumulation of whiteness’ (Issar et al. 2021). I propose that a ‘primitive accumulation of safety’ which posits Jewish safety to justify ever-escalating repression, places Jews at the forefront of an ultimately doomed project to rescue western civilisation.
In response, the demand should not be for institutions to recognise other forms of racism, jostling for space alongside the dominant place being given to antisemitism. Rather, we should take an abolitionist approach to all definitions which, when rendered as rule, have the sole purpose of destroying what Robinson called ‘humanity indivisible from the collective relation’ (Robinson 2016: 18).