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On 15 March 2019, fifty-one Muslim people, mainly of South Asian or African origin, including several young children, were massacred during Friday prayers by Brenton Tarrant, a white Australian, self-proclaimed ‘ecofascist’ in Christchurch, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Muslim people close to me responded with grief, shock, rage, but not surprise. White supremacism was suddenly on everyone’s lips. The Christchurch massacre has since inspired at least two other lethal terrorist attacks. In El Paso, Texas, on 3 August 2019, twenty-two people were shot by twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius. A week later, another twenty-one year old, Philip Manhaus, carried out an attack on the al-Noor Islamic Centre near Oslo, claiming to have been inspired by the Christchurch and El Paso events. In Halle, East Germany, on Yom Kippur (9 October), the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Stephan B. admitted that ‘antisemitic and right-wing extremist beliefs’ had inspired him to attack a synagogue, ending up killing two bystanders, neither of whom were Jewish (Deutsche Welle 2019). What links all of these attacks and their perpetrators is the fact that they were motivated by white supremacism and the consequent hatred for Black people, immigrants, Muslims, and Jews. One dangerously racist concept stands out as a key motivator: white genocide, 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 from each other, matured within the context of European colonial domination over the majority of the world. Therefore, although with the birth of the modern nation-state in Europe racism and nationalism entered into a reciprocal relationship (Petitjean and Balibar 2015), race as a regime of power is ‘colonially constituted’, as Barnor Hesse explains (Hesse 2016). What Hesse means by this is that, ultimately, race is about the delineation not only of whites from non-whites, but of the essence of Europeanness from that of non-Europeanness.

Therefore, race is above all else a project of colonial distinction and a system of legitimation to justify oppressive and discriminatory practices. This unfurls internally, within national societies, for example producing eugenicist hierarchies of the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor (Shilliam 2018). Racial logic is also at work in the false idea that there are ‘enclaves’ or ‘ghettoes’ of ‘self-segregating’ migrant communities that disrupt the possibility of social cohesion. It underpins the conspiratorial notion that ‘rootless, cosmopolitan elites’ are responsible for a negative influence on society, to the detriment of the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants, as has been argued by Paul Embery, a former fire-fighter on the right wing of the British labour movement, mobilizing old antisemitic tropes (Cartledge 2019). Externally, it plays a role in reproducing narratives of European progress vis-à-vis the supposed poverty, or non-existence, of Indigenous and majority world languages and knowledges. As one philosopher colleague once told me, unironically, ‘There are no non-European philosophies!’ It creates the notion of developed and developing worlds. It casts the white, the western, and the European – each co-constitutive of each other – as neutral and universal, while everything that cannot be captured by these categories is cast as specific only to the time and place in which it is produced, never serving as a global exemplar.

The central ruse or illusion created by racial logics is that everything in the world has a fixed or natural place. That is why extreme racial regimes like Apartheid, Nazism, or Jim Crow punished ‘race-mixing’. However, to fully understand why race continues to have power, even after these systems of rule have been abolished, we must understand why it needed to be legislated for in the first place. Race, having no bearing in reality, had to be invented and needed to be constantly secured. For example, a panoply of mechanisms and practices was needed to pin down the US institution of slavery and to attach an inferior racial status to Black people’s bodies, before criminalizing them as a group. These included branding, plantation rules, black codes, identity papers, lantern laws, dress codes, and runaway notices. Simone Browne describes the passage of the lantern laws in seventeenth-century colonial New York city, which ruled that the black body remain illuminated at night (Browne 2015; see also Garcia-Rojas 2016). These laws not only introduced practices of surveillance which Black people remain subjected to today, but they also created and policed ‘racial boundaries’ that still cohere in the common idea that Black people pose a threat to public and individual safety. How else to explain the practice of reporting Black people to the police for simply existing in spaces it is not deemed they should be in? As found in the coronial inquiry held into the death in police custody of Aboriginal grandmother Tanya Day in September 2019, she had been arrested for ‘being unruly’ because she had fallen asleep on a train while on her way to visit her pregnant daughter (Human Rights Law Centre 2019). She died alone in the ‘lock-up’.

Police powers and legislation, such as segregation laws, or, to take the aforementioned much more recent example, the ban on the hijab in French schools, are deemed necessary because race is above all else an idea in search of reassurance (Wolfe 2016). It is on such shaky conceptual ground that it needs to be constantly filled with content, fed like a hungry animal. This is what makes it what Stuart Hall calls a ‘sliding signifier’. Its slipperiness makes it difficult to pin down. While we argue about just what defines race or whether this or that event or arrangement can really be racist, race is doing its job of, as Hall put it, sidling ‘around the edge of the veranda and climb[ing] back in through the pantry window’ (S. Hall 2017: 37). Race continues to matter because it is in a continual process of reinvention.

Despite this, for many it is dangerous to speak about race and better to talk about racism as a set of practices produced by the ‘ideology’, or what has been referred to as the ‘folk idea’, of race (Fields et al. 2015; Haider 2018a). However, race is not ‘stuck’ in the nineteenth century, and, as I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 2, it did not ‘end’ with the Holocaust, Apartheid, or Jim Crow. I disagree that it is sufficient or possible to talk about racism without explaining the genealogy of race as a system of rule and revealing this process of continual reproduction. I believe that racism is better understood as beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and morals that build on understandings of the world as racially delineated. I explore the evolution of racism, only coined at the end of the nineteenth century, in order to make sense of intra-European racial divisions, predominantly antisemitism, in Chapter 2. My point here it that we need to work with both concepts – race and racism – because they are reliant on each other. I prefer to label my approach to scholarship ‘race critical’, rather than the more common ‘critical race’, in recognition of the fact that while we can and should use race analytically, we should also question its terms.

Preferencing racism over race runs a certain risk because, outside of scholarly and activist conversations, racism is used in a very particular way in the public domain to confer a moral judgement. It is now universally understood that to be racist is to have erred morally, as an individual. This is why, as Sara Ahmed has shown (Ahmed 2012), the primary response to accusations of racism is horror and outrage: how dare you call me a racist? And as the Aboriginal rapper Adam Briggs said after Australian football players appeared at a party in blackface, ‘People look at me like it’s my problem. Like pointing out racism is worse than the act itself. Saying “that’s racist” creates more drama than the actual blackface situation’ (McCormack 2016).

Racism has been successfully personified as embodied by the bad attitude of ignorant or ‘vicious’ individuals (Garcia 1999). While, as Lewis Gordon argues, ‘bad faith’ always plays a role in racism, it is not, the full picture (Gordon 1999). And while we must be careful not to allow an emphasis on the structures, processes, laws, and practices that bring race to life to deny individual responsibility for racist behaviours, the predominant approach to racism which centres on the punishment and ostracization of a minority of individuals ‘unlucky’ to be ‘caught in the act’ has been far from sufficient as an approach to ending racial rule. As the late founder of the London Institute of Race Relations, Ambalavaner Sivanadan, said scathingly in the 1980s, the ‘racism awareness training’ events that became popular in the UK ‘removed state and institutional responsibility for racism, instead turning it into a “natural” social phenomenon independent of material conditions, a “white disease”’ (Srilangarajah 2018). Racism itself is not a pathology, even if the fervour with which its borders are policed can appear irrational.

Racism’s apparent unreason plays a role in pushing race as a serious subject to the margins of scholarship. This, as well as the balder fact that there is systemic benefit to be had for maintaining what the philosopher of race Charles Mills calls a structural ‘white ignorance’ (Mills 2007), contributes to a profound lack of racial literacy in the public sphere. Lani Guinier describes racial literacy as ‘an interactive process in which race functions as a tool of diagnosis, feedback, and assessment. [R]acial literacy emphasizes the relationship between race and power ... [and] constantly interrogates the dynamic relationship among race, class, geography, gender, and other explanatory variables’ (Guinier 2004: 114–15). Racial literacy pedagogy has the potential to unsettle the ‘white comfort’ underpinning the dominant approach to racism, which relies on individualized, moral accounts and that sees it as out of the ordinary, extraneous, and excessive to white self-understandings. To cite a student who attended Odette Kelada’s racial literacy course at the University of Melbourne, ‘Growing up I was never taught to think about my race as something that influenced the opportunities that I got or the way that I was treated, whereas as a white person, that has framed my entire existence’ (Wang 2018). However, this kind of opportunity to enhance racial literacy is rare and, with the increasing right-wing backlash against ethnic and gender studies around the Global North, the slight opportunities that do exist risk disappearing if we are not vigilant. As Suhraiya Jivraj argues, in universities, students ‘rarely get to hear their lecturers teach or facilitate “safe” classroom discussions about racism, particularly outside of specialist modules. To talk about racism or even (institutional) whiteness has become almost taboo’ (Jivraj 2019). And while, as Ali Meghji notes, exciting conversations are happening among radical, Black, and other racialized students about how to ‘decolonize the university’, these are nonetheless happening within settings that are still undergirded by coloniality and an attendant epistemic hegemony which construes ‘provincial’ western knowledge as both superior and as universally applicable (Meghji 2019).

Why Race Still Matters should be read not as an appeal, but as an affirmation. Race, Cornel West wrote, simply does matter (West 2017 [1992]). As you read this book, however, you will notice that I am frustrated at how little race is said to matter. In fact, when those who face racism speak out, they find themselves policed for ‘making it about race’, as though they – not the persistence of racial rule – were responsible for their own oppression. As one headline in the French republican magazine Marianne screamed: ‘Race obsessives on the offensive. They import American political correctness, they infiltrate the universities, clubs and unions, they want to ban art, they want to end universalism’ (Girard and Mathoux 2019). This book, then, is a call to notice not just when and how race matters but when, how, and why it is said to be of no significance. It is a call to notice that talking about race mattering is so often equated with extremism, even as violence proliferates in the name of an idealized racial purity.

Why Race Still Matters circumnavigates a range of debates in the contemporary politics of race. It is not a textbook, and neither is it a holistic account. Supplementary reading into terms I introduce, such as racial capitalism, white supremacism, or racial rule, will be necessary if, as I hope, I have managed to convince you that we all need more and better racial literacy. Therefore, the book explores trends in the politics of race that I believe are significant and which I have been tracking for a number of years.

This book is a call to notice not just when and how race matters but when, how, and why it is said to be of no significance.

In Chapter 1, I propose that it is pointless to argue about race using the terms of the discredited and bogus concepts of ‘racial science’. Efforts to demonstrate that race is socially constructed and not a biological reality have largely failed, as can be witnessed in the resurgent popularity of so-called ‘race realism’ and the defence by prominent academics and public figures of eugenic research in the name of ‘academic freedom’. Rather, we need to theorize race as a political project with ongoing effects.

Chapter 2 posits that the power to define racism is taken away from those most affected by it. The widespread tendency to question what is and is not racism should be understood as a form of discursive racist violence. However, while the habit of labelling obviously racist events as ‘not racism’ by a defensive white public is growing, this is not new. Rather, to understand why there is so much debate about what can and cannot be called racism, we need to revisit the history of its evolution as a concept.

In Chapter 3, I argue that on the left as well as on the right of politics there is a dangerous tendency to downplay the effects of race by dismissing those who talk about it as divisive ‘identitarians’. The constant production of outrage about the apparent excesses of ‘identity politics’ is having a negative effect on the possibilities for antiracist solidarity grounded in a race-critical politics. I explain why we should be sceptical of the intentions of those who argue that ‘making it about race’ is playing into the hands of the right.

The fourth chapter examines the ways in which the objection to antisemitism has been used as a proxy for a commitment to antiracism on behalf of all racialized people. Politicians’ proclamations against antisemitism draw attention away from the fact that it has always been an elite project. Exclusive responsibility for antisemitism is placed onto minoritized communities, in particular Muslims. Instead, in order to adequately theorize antisemitism today, we need to see it as entangled with Islamophobia. Only this will permit Jews on the left to oppose our manipulation in the service of racism and colonialism, returning us to what the theorist of decolonial Judaism Santiago Slabodsky calls our ‘barbarian’ roots (Slabodsky 2015).

In conclusion, I revisit the key point made by the book, that understanding how race matters is essential for a fuller understanding of our contemporary lives. I propose that difficult conversations about race are taking place among those whom it affects, and it is the responsibility of everyone to reject defensiveness, and to listen and engage. This is, as Stuart Hall put it, a process and a politics ‘without guarantees’, one that is all the more important for being so.

My hope is to have successfully argued that, far from anchoring us in pessimism, or a feeling that we are trapped in a history destined to repeat, it is through better understanding of how and why race matters that we can all one day be more free. But I also want you to get angry, because, far from a useless emotion (Lorde 1981), it is anger against the injustice that makes race still matter that will pave the way to that freedom; not a selective anger, but a relational one, an anger that, despite my appeal not to leave race behind just yet, motivates us to seek a day when we can do exactly that.