What Is Antiracism? - by Arun Kundnani (Paperback)

About the Book

"argues that we misunderstand contemporary capitalism if we miss the centrality of racism to neoliberalism"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Drawing lessons from a long tradition of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and Marxist intellectuals and movements, Arun Kundnani demonstrates how racism and capitalism are indivisible parts of one global system. And unless we can see the whole, we'll never know how to fight."
--Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

"This is the book we need to deepen our understanding of how ideas of racism and anti-racism became divorced from questions of who has what and why. Kundnani explains in gorgeous detail how in the twentieth century, people who were struggling to build a new world came to comprehend racism, capitalism, and colonialism as codependent systems. And he shows us how neoliberalism has shaped new racisms-involving, for example, 'the terrorist' and 'the welfare queen'--pointing to key areas of the fight today."
--Amna A. Akbar, professor of law, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law

"An important and absorbing intervention into debates around racism today, illuminating the profound structural links between imperialism, racism and capitalism. Kundnani shows us how an understanding of this long history is a vital resource for our fights against exploitation and oppression today."
--Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire

"With theoretical precision and clarity, Kundnani lays out the failings of liberals and the left, offering instead a radical anti-racism fit for tackling the urgent issues facing the world today."
--Adam Elliott-Cooper, author of Black Resistance to British Policing

"What is Antiracism? is going to be a major staple for decades to come."
--Joshua Briond, host of the Millennials Are Killing Capitalism podcast

"Tears into the system-and the liberal excuses that surround it"
--Yuri Prasad, Socialist Worker

"Provide[s] a structural analysis of racism, including colonialism and capitalism, whilst showing how liberal ideas of anti-racism can be easily co-opted to support new forms of racist power ... an essential read"
--Benjamin Ashraf, New Arab

"Cutting ... With over three decades of activism and an impressive body of work to his name, Kundnani draws on a history of collective struggle to offer answers to how anti-racism can be rescued from corporate whitewashing to instead challenge the structures of 'racial capitalism'."
--Sigrid Corey, Red Pepper

"Kundnani's powerful portrayal of the structural role of racism under neoliberalism is a clear demonstration that white and Black workers do indeed have interests in common in overthrowing the capitalism system, and of the importance of a Marxist analysis for understanding this."
--Elaine Graham-Leigh, Counterfire

About the Author

Arun Kundnani has been active in antiracist movements in Britain and the United States for three decades. He is a former editor of the journal Race & Class and was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. The Guardian has described him as "one of Britain's best political writers." He lives in central New York state.