What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism

This scintillating intellectual and political history provides a new understanding of racism, and a better way to fight it

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and anthropologist Ruth Benedict called for teaching people, especially poor people, to be less prejudiced. Here lies the origin of today's liberal antiracism, from diversity training to Hollywood activism. Meanwhile, a more radical antiracism flowered in the Third World. Anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of modernity. Thinkers like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon showed how racism was connected to colonialism and capitalism, a perspective adopted even by Martin Luther King.

Today, liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. As Arun Kundnani demonstrates, white liberals can heroically confront their own whiteness all they want, yet these structures remain.

This deeply researched and swift-moving narrative history tells the story of the two antiracisms and their fates. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became clear: fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots.

Author: Arun Kundnani
Publisher: Verso
Published: 06/13/2023
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.70w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781839762765


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 05/31/2023

About the Author
Arun Kundnani is Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a former editor of the journal Race & Class. Born in London, he has lived in New York since 2010. He has appeared regularly on broadcast news media, such as CNN and BBC News, and has written for the Guardian, Intercept, Washington Post, the Nation, and Dissent. His last book, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014) sold 12,847 copies by the end of 2017 and was translated into Arabic and Spanish. A review in the Guardian described him as "one of Britain's best political writers." His first book, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain (Pluto, 2007), was selected as a book of the year by the New Statesman. He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at New York Public Library and an Open Society Fellow. He is the lead author of Leaving
the War on Terror (Transnational Institute, forthcoming), which develops a detailed policy agenda as an alternative to Britain's current counterterrorism policies. He holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University, and an MA from Cambridge University.