Anti-racism in the age of White supremacy and backlash
- Publisher:
- Emerald
- Publication Type:
- Journal Article
- Citation:
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 2021, 40, (2), pp. 105-113
- Issue Date:
- 2021-03-05
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-racism_in_the_age_of_Whit.pdf | 114.11 kB |
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As we wrote these opening words in the original Call for Papers of our special issue in April 2019, we were tuning in to a swelling undercurrent of antagonistic sentiment that simultaneously over-inflated and delegitimised the gains in racial equality made over the past half-century. This so-called “post-racial” political discourse asserted that we were all equal now and that racial equality posed a threat to nations of the Global North. Yet a parallel discourse constructed immigrants and refugees as the scapegoats of wealth disparity. Narratives of nostalgia soothed anxieties by whitewashing history as racially uncomplicated and stoked defensiveness to changes, including the felling of celebratory memorials to colonialists and the election of a democratic presidential candidate.
We could not foresee then neither how violently nor how quickly we would arrive at the state of affairs today, with the intensity of the currently emerging shifts in race relations around the world. Over the past year, we have witnessed a dramatic discontent to the slow and limited progress made towards equality, alongside a creeping antipathy to grassroots calls for social justice, highlighting the distance between rhetoric and reality. Interconnected international uprisings were organised to create a Movement for Black Lives, the implications of which have challenged nearly every industry, including higher education and each academic discipline. Moreover, social unrest, cynicism and fear are fuelled by an economic crisis caused by a global pandemic and neoliberal disaster mismanagement that has disproportionately affected communities, especially women, people of colour and the global poor.
This combination of events has forced a racial awakening, perhaps even a reckoning, in the public sphere. Those who had regarded the world as having entered a post-race era were impelled to adjust their view of reality, in which racism is something that happens “over there”. Many found themselves re-evaluating their understanding of racism itself and the taken-for-granted social structures that perpetuate it. Long-standing abolitionist calls to defund the police have taken root; anti-racist and decolonial practice and intellectual leadership by Black, Indigenous and people of colour have entered the White agora, and people who were once bystanders to the ways in which White supremacy manifests increasingly felt compelled to challenge the racial injustice they saw in their neighbourhoods, their governments and their everyday lives.
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