What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism

by Arun Kundnani Verso Books 6/13/2023, hardcover SKU: 9781839762765   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 structu