the belief that white people are under threat of forced extinction and that this ‘great replacement’ has been orchestrated by a multiculturalist plot thrust on an innocent public by a nefarious elite.
This book is not about white supremacist extremism or its conspiracy theories. However, I begin with Christchurch, El Paso, Oslo, and Halle because they sharpen what we are actually talking about when we talk about race. Race matters because the things done in its name have the power to bring about what the Black radical scholar and abolitionist activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called ‘vulnerability to premature death’ (Gilmore 2006: 28).
Extreme racial violence is on the rise, but extremely violent racists do not hold the monopoly in this regard. Certainly, according to a growing number of white supremacists in Europe, North America, and Australasia, we are in the throes of a race war. They are armed and ready to act. However, many more people of colour die, are physically or mentally injured, or suffer in other ways at the hands of the state. ‘In the United States, police officers fatally shoot about three people per day on average’ (Peeples 2019), 38% of whom are Black (Mapping Police Violence n.d.). Thirty-five Aboriginal people in Australia committed suicide in just three months during 2019, which is also a form of racially inflicted violence (Allam 2019). In 2019 alone, moreover, 681 people died while trying to cross the Mediterranean sea to reach Europe (IOM 2019). Speaking of racial violence makes the power of race to divide human beings into those who deserve life and those whose death is dismissed, or even justified, very clear. Racist ideas, practices, and policies do not always result in violence or death, but they are never very far away. For example, just as the French senate was passing a law at the end of October 2019 to make it illegal for mothers who wear the Muslim hijab to accompany their children on school outings, Claude Sinké, an eighty-four-year-old former far-right Front national candidate, shot and grievously injured two people at a mosque in the town of Bayonne (Brigaudeau 2019). In a France rendered hysterical by the spectre of ‘Islamization’, racist policies and the endless polemics that accompany them have violent consequences.
Given this, it is easy to see why many people would be uncomfortable with the argument this book makes, that race still matters. Race matters to white supremacist terrorists. Race matters to the growing number of public figures and academics, some of whom I discuss in Chapter 1, who believe we need to be realistic about what they see as innate racial differences between groups in the population. Race matters to proponents of extreme ‘identitarianism’ who are opposed to dialogue and solidarity-building between groups. Because race matters to these groups, many antiracists believe that it should have no place in the lexicon of right-minded people. In contrast, I think that while all of these may be reasons to approach the subject of race with great care, they are not reasons for not talking about race.
My reasons for talking about race are bound up with my own experience as a Jewish woman from the periphery of Europe. I was brought up in an Ireland that was still almost monolithically Catholic, where being Jewish, albeit white, was not as comfortable or hegemonic an experience as it may be for Jews in large cities in the US, for example, where they have more successfully become ‘white folks’ (Brodkin 1999). Implicitly understanding this distinction from a young age, when I used to sit on the living room carpet for hours browsing a book of photographs about the Holocaust titled The Yellow Star, instilled in me an understanding of how race works, although it took me years of study to be able to name it as such. However, this was only a part of my trajectory. Before being brought to Ireland as an infant, I had been born on colonized Palestinian land, the granddaughter of refugees from fascist Romania. Today, as a privileged multiple migrant, having moved from Europe to Australia in 2012, I unwillingly perhaps, but unavoidably nevertheless, participate in the colonization of yet another unceded territory, the Gadigal country in otherwise named Sydney, Australia. This knowledge has provided me with a perspective on race and a commitment to unmasking its colonial roots and routes along with my own complicity in maintaining it through my occupation of a particular location in the racial ordering of the place I am in, as well as the world as it is currently organized. My racialized positioning has allowed me to migrate when so many are denied this right. This has the benefit of giving me insight into how race works across contexts, which is analogous to race itself as a travelling concept. I have lived, studied, and worked in several European countries, as well as Australia and, briefly in 2017, the US. This book thus offers a transnationally informed theorization of why and how race still matters across several locations, and as read in multiple languages. I hope this provides an interesting counterpoint to the North American hegemony within race scholarship that sometimes has a debilitating effect on local theory-building. At the same time, I do not pretend to offer a universal account of race. Rather, my interpretation is grounded in my knowledge and experience, gained in the places I know best and which I have read most about, predominantly the UK, Australia, France, and North America.
Why Race Still Matters departs from a simple question that I have been asking myself for a long time: how do we explain race and oppose the dehumanization and discrimination committed in its name if we do not speak about it? Not speaking about race does not serve those who are targeted by racism. But it does benefit those who are not. Racial logic trades on the idea that there are profound forces that shape fundamental human differences – genetic, geographical, world historical, cultural, and so on – which the layperson cannot understand; a bogus idea that must be exposed. Talking about race does not mean accepting its terms of reference. Like any structure of power – capitalism, class, gender, heterosexualism, or ability – the reason we must speak about race is to attempt to unmask it in order to undo its effects. This is what I hope this book can offer.
But first, what is race? And what is racism? And how are the two linked?
I formulate race as a technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy on both a local and a planetary scale. This definition is indebted to the work of many scholars, first and foremost the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall. For Hall, race is ‘one of those major or master concepts (the masculine form is deliberate) that organize the great classificatory systems of difference that operate in human societies. Race, in this sense, is the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences’ (S. Hall 2017: 32–3). Hall also offers us an understanding that, although race is about the ‘inscription of power on the body’, it has no meaning as an actual biological or physical distinction that exists in nature (2017: 47). Moreover, the biological understanding of race is only one way in which the racial distinction is constructed; geographical, religious, cultural, and, only lastly, biological or genetic explanations of why Europeans theorized that they were superior to, and should therefore dominate, non-Europeans were all used to make of race the ‘central term organizing the great classificatory systems of difference in modern human history’ (2017: 33). Therefore, as Alexander Weheliye writes, it is more conducive to conceptualize race as a set of what he calls ‘racializing assemblages’, a series of ‘discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artifacts’ that, together, ensure the maintenance of political structures and institutions in ways that bar ‘non-white subjects’ from being considered fully human (Weheliye 2014: 3).
Weheliye’s concept of assemblages is in part indebted to Stuart Hall’s theorization of race as an articulation, or a series of linkages between different structures of dominance. Therefore, we need to think of other structures of power – capitalism, gender, sexuality, class, and ability – as working through race, and vice versa. As systems that produce oppression, ranking, exclusion, and – to use Gilmore’s formulation again – the possibility of ‘premature death’, these, like race, were produced within specific historical contexts. At a general level, the categorization and ranking of humans into putatively natural groupings along racial, gendered, and classed lines grew in necessity at the start of the modern era, in Europe. As Robin Kelley puts it, in his foreword to Cedric Robinson’s book on the evolution and development of racial capitalism, Black Marxism, race is ‘rooted in premodern European civilization’ (Kelley 2000: xiii). However, both race and capitalism, developing together and inextricable
