Anti-racism designates
a branch of critical theory and activism that
debunks the validity of the concept of “race”.
Proposing instead that “race”
is a social construct designed to legitimate
various asymmetries of power, anti-racism
interrogates and challenges private and public
practices that hinge on racist epistemologies.
Anti Racist Action (ARA)
Anti-Racism Media Education (ARMEd)
Campaign Against the Nazis (CAN)
Edward Said
Etienne Balibar
Paul Gilroy
Pierre-Andre Taguieff
Richard Day
Rosemary Henze
Sarita Srivastava
Sunera Thobani
W.E.B. Du Bois
Black autonomy
Cross-issue solidarity
Groundless solidarity
Intersectional analysis
Postcolonial theory
Too many to list. Anti-racist
theorists and activists have and continue
to deploy a wide array of practices. Anti-Racist
Action (ARA) stresses demonstrations and confrontations
with ‘fascist’ protestors, while
Anti-Racism Media Education
(ARMEd) emphasizes community education and
letter writing campaigns.
Anti-racism began as
a rejection of the attempt to divide human
beings into biological “races“.
Its ’foundation’ can perhaps be
located in the early 1960’s in the work
of Claude Levi-Strauss, who emphasized culture,
and not ’race’, as a marker of
difference. To this day anti-racist theorists
usually cite findings by anthropologists,
biologists, geneticists and other academics,
which in recent years have reached the consensus
that humans do not form genetically discrete
groups in any biological sense.(1) While physical
similarities certainly exist, the range of
genetic variation in human beings is too great
to allow for any reliable system of racial
classification. As such, classification systems
that attempt to
order and group human beings into separate
and distinct “races” (usually
on the basis of physical appearance) are arbitrary
and devoid of scientific value.
Anti-racism points out, for example, for “race”
to have any validity it would have to be grounded
in objective criteria. Racial classification,
however, focuses “on only a few visible,
superficial, genetic traits - such as skin
colour and hair
texture”(2). Should it attempt to be
objective, such a system would soon collapse
under its own weight, as any trait (i.e. height,
eye colour, hair type) could be used to classify
(and invent) a new “race”. This
is not to say that patterns and certain physical
similarities cannot be observed in human beings.
Anti-racism does acknowledge that many traits
have a geographic distribution. The point,
however, is that for “race” to
exist objectively, all of these “these
traits would have to covary,” when in
fact they do not.(3)
As such, anti-racism sees “race”
as at best a problematic, analytical tool
that has been used to account for physical
differences, at worst as an explanation and
justification of social differences that must
be challenged and dismantled.
As anti-racism throughout the 1990’s
has begun to note,(4) “race” does
not start nor stop with biology. In attempting
to undo the ontological status of “race”,
antiracism has become aware of the need to
challenge, what sociologist Pierre-
Andre Taguieff has termed ‘neo-racism’:
a system of human differentiation that bases
its judgements not on biological but cultural
categories. Because it has adapted itself
to the scientific findings cited above by
replacing “race” with
“culture”, it can be said that
neo-racism has to a certain extent learned
from antiracism. Taguieff went even so far
as to blame anti-racism for facilitating this
development. He argues that because anti-racism
sought “to combat racism by
insisting upon the equal valorisation of all
cultures and a respect for difference”(5),
the basic operations of racism - the assigning
of difference to a single category - remained
unchallenged.
Accordingly, anti-racism today approaches
“race” and racism as multi-layered
phenomenon that requires intersectional analyses.
To anti-racists, racist systems are still
nothing short of ideological defences of racial
practices fuelled by
pseudo-science, anxiety, and fear. Racist
practices, however, carry different implications
for members of different groups. “Race”,
therefore, must be analysed and approached
not only as a biologic myth but also as a
system of
differentiation that is informed and defined
by age, gender, sexual orientation, class,
along with other axes of identification. From
the point of intersectional analysis we can
say that someone who is black and teenage,
heterosexual, and working class will experience
racism differently from someone who is black
and middle-age, homosexual, and middle class.
The adaptation of intersectional analysis
means that anti-racism cannot, as it did in
its early years, align itself with the Enlightenment
tradition which sought to dispel racism as
a symptom ignorance. Instead, anti-racism,
argue its theorists,
must seek out racism in all of its guises.
In so doing, anti-racism cannot pretend to
have ‘found’ the light which it
would carry into the darkness of ignorance,
but must always search “all of the sites,
structures, and processes of oppression”,(6)
that guide and structure racist thought. As
such, anti-racism has also assumed the stance
of groundless solidarity, aligning itself
with a plethora of movements and individuals
who struggle against interlocking and mutually
reinforcing structures of oppression.
1 See Bamshad, J.B., &
Olson, S. E. (2003). “Does Race Exist?” American
Scientific. December, pp. 78-85.
2 Mukhopadhyay, C., & Henze, R. C. (2003). “How Real is Race?: Using
anthropology to make sense of human diversity.” Phi Delta Kappan, 84(9),
pp.
669-678.
3 Ibid.
4 “…ultimately racism is not about colour but about politics - though
racist
ideologues are quite capable of concocting a spurious politics of colour.”
Cohen,
S. (2003). No One Is Illegal: asylum and immigration control past and present.
(Trentham) p.19.
5 Lentin, A. (2000). “’Race’, Racism and Anti-Racism: Challenging
Contemporary
Classifications.” Social Identities 6 (1), pp. 91-106.
6 Day, R. J. F. (Forthcoming). Affinities.
Antifascism (Russian)
http://a-fa.narod.ru/
Anti-Racist Action Network
http://www.aranet.org/
Anti-Racism Media Education
http://opirg.sa.utoronto.ca/armed/
Challenging White Supremacy Workshop
http://www.cwsworkshop.org/resources/ARAgenda.html
Colours of Resistance
http://colours.mahost.org/
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
http://www.incite-national.org/
Ontario Black Anti-racist Research Institute
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2381/
White Privilege
http://www.whiteprivilege.com/
ZNet Race Watch
http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/racewatch.cfm
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