I was delighted to have been invited to be a discussant at the launch of a new important book, A New Wave of Antiracism in Europe? Racialized Minorities at the Centre edited by Ilke Adam, Jean Beaman and Mariska Jung.
The book can be freely downloaded as a PDF or ebook here.
In discussing whether there is a ‘new wave’ of antiracism, the editors in their Introduction build on my work in Racism and Antiracism in Europe (2004), writing,
But are these features of anti-racism actually new? After all, the claim that a “new wave” shares the listed characteristics implicitly suggests that racialized minorities did not participate in anti-racist struggles before. And racialized minority activists likely had already pushed for larger interpretations of racism as structural, instead of a narrow understanding of racism as individual prejudice or deviant behavior. Alana Lentin (2004) demonstrates, in one of the rare sociological comparative studies on anti-racism in Europe, that these features of anti-racism said to be “new” are not. She shows that the anti-racism by victims of racism themselves is critical of the state and its institutional racism, and often grounded in the belief of self-organization developed in Europe out of the anti-colonial struggle and the interrelated calls to Black resistance (Lentin, 2004). Lentin also illustrates that this type of anti-racism (which she terms anti-racism distant from the public political culture) was present in Europe amongst others within immigrant and solidarity groups and the “Mouvement Beur” in 1980s France, and in the Black Power Movement in Britain from the 1970s onwards. However, these forms of anti-racism were far less present than what Lentin terms as “mainstream” or “hegemonic” anti-racism. This last type of anti-racism believes in the state and human rights as guarantors of anti-racism. Lentin’s analysis demonstrates, in detail, that such anti-racism distant from the public political culture was absent in Ireland and Italy, was strongly marginalized in France, and more prominent, but still silenced, in the UK. In summary, state-centered anti-racism grounded in the experience of racialized minorities was an existent type of anti-racism, but generally marginalized, and therefore, silenced.
You can watch a recording of the event below which involved a fascinating discussion between co-editors Jean Beaman and Ilke Adam and contributing authors Diana Mulinari, Kékéli Kpgognon, Ojeaku Nwabuzo, Rosana Albuquerque and Sibo Rugziwa Kanobana.