This book has surely raised more questions than it has provided answers. However, the difference between those who question race and those who merely accept it is the difference between the ‘race realist’ and the race-critical antiracist. ‘Race realists’ are racists; race critics fight racism. We use the tools at our disposal to expose how race is produced and reproduced; how it attaches to a range of political, economic, familial, sexual, and social projects; how it coalesces with gender and heterosexualism; and how it is deeply tied to the past and present of capitalism and to the structures of knowledge production.
Between these two groups – racist and race-critical antiracist – there are those who choose to be silent about race. They believe that the best way to challenge racism is to refuse to speak about race. They fear that referring to race risks naturalizing and solidifying human distinctions. But it is not race-critical scholarship or activism that creates racists. Racists are created by the conditions established by racial rule over the course of modernity. So, as I hope to have convinced you, it is not by refusing to make reference to race that it will matter less. Race matters regardless of these good intentions. We are not served by talking in euphemisms or pretending that race belongs to the past.
In May 2018, hundreds of people, almost all Black and Brown, gathered in the town hall at Saint Denis, a working-class neighbourhood of Paris, for the ‘Bandung of the Global North’ conference, recalling the 1955 ‘intercontinental gathering of people of colour’ held in Bandung, Indonesia (‘Bandung du Nord’ 2018). The hall, which had seen better days, was abuzz. Angela Davis was headlining the opening night. The participants stayed for an entire weekend. They listened, they contested, they cheered, and they danced.
I met David Palumbo-Liu there. David is a staunch activist for Palestine and against fascism on US campuses. He writes that the ‘Bandung conference’ took place on the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968, and cites the sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, who said that the 2018 event was
a way to distance ourselves from the narrative of 1968, as it was told in the mainstream media by the French elite, who feel that 1968 belongs to them. Things are happening now that require another narrative of what ’68 was. We [indigenous people of colour] do not belong to the north – we happen to be in the north. Therefore, we have a vantage point to understand the north in a particularly critical way. (Palumbo-Liu 2018)
Guénif-Souilamas’s words recall those of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who reminded the British that ‘we are here because you were there’ (Younge 2018).
Across town at the same time as the Bandung conference was taking place, an anti-austerity demonstration was organized by La France insoumise. As Houria Bouteldja, one of the Bandung conference organizers, noted in her address, ‘This demonstration, which I welcome personally as I welcome the strikes that are going on right now … is almost an allegory of our spaces, our times, of our parallel worlds: white and indigènes.1 Them in Paris, us in Saint Denis.’ Race and class came together at the Bandung conference. Race should have mattered to the anti-austerity protesters too. As Stuart Hall noted almost forty years previously, observing debates within the labour movement in Britain, ‘The structures through which black labour is reproduced … are not simply “coloured” by race; they work through race. … Race ... is the modality through which class is lived’ (S. Hall 1980: 340). Black and other racialized people, activists and scholars have not had the privilege of ignoring how race matters. They have been explaining it in many different ways and in many different spaces. Yet those for whom it is more comforting to believe that race does not matter, or that it matters less than it used to, or less than other forms of oppression, often do not listen.
No one finds it easy to admit that they benefit from racial arrangements, as Robin DiAngelo shows in her book on ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo 2018). In Chapter 2, my discussion of the dominance of the narrative of ‘not racism’ revealed that, because many white people have come to conflate talking about race with being personally accused of racism, race as a matter of serious study and discussion is avoided. My argument is that pretending race does not matter does not make it go away. Instead it lingers and festers. I do not argue that race should matter, but that it simply does matter, today, but hopefully not forever.
One of the reasons why it has been so easy to claim that race does not matter is because Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people, who have first-hand experience of racism, are still not heard from often enough in the public sphere. Their scholarship is marginalized, and they face institutional racism. Consequently, as I have argued, the public is not equipped with the racial literacy needed to make sense of the historical conditions that made race matter. When people who face racism do speak about race, they are often heard as needlessly complaining. We can witness the inequities established in the name of race when racialized people are silenced. When they do speak, white publics are forced to address the fact that this is all too rare, and that much of what people of colour say about race is heard through the filter of epistemic Eurocentrism, in which we have been steeped from a young age. Thanks to racial-colonial rule, this is not even confined to the Global North. The Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote of the ubiquity of English-language education in Africa that: ‘The language of power is English and that becomes internalized. … You normalize the abnormal and the absurdities of colonialism, and turn them into a norm from which you operate. Then you don’t even think about it’ (Wade 2018).
Reproducing racial-colonial knowledge is an ongoing endeavour. For example, the Australian government has spent $48.7 million to mark the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s first voyage to Australia and the Pacific in 1768. The primary school curriculum is replete with narrations of the endeavours of the ‘First Fleet’. The simple request not to celebrate Australia Day on the day Aboriginal lands were invaded is met with white protesters carrying banners reading ‘To defend my country was once called patriotism, now it’s called racism’ (Loomes and Bedo 2019).
Choosing not to make race matter, then, is inextricably tied to assumptions about who can be a knower (Collins 2000; L. T. Smith 2012). It is driven by what Gurminder Bhambra calls ‘methodological whiteness’ which distorts ‘social scientific accounts’ (Bhambra 2017: S214). There are many things that are known about racialized people, knowledge that is used in their continued subjugation, the data collected expanding infinitely in our hyper-surveilled, digitized, always-on landscape, where, for many, the street, not the prison, has become the panopticon (Browne 2015; Vitale and Jefferson 2016). But knowledge elaborated by Black, Brown, Indigenous, Muslim, Roma, and other racialized people, particularly knowledge about race, is regarded as suspect. It is common to hear it said that to understand race and racism requires objectivity, and that only unaffected bystanders have the capacity for interpretation. Being too close to the experience of racism, it is suggested, leads to emotion taking over from reason (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). This unfounded belief at the heart of an epistemically racist positivism contributes to the idea that race does not really matter and that making it matter too much is the thorn in the side of a happier future. This is born of the white ignorance that is not actual ignorance but the false ignorance of those who wish to dictate what is knowable (Grosfoguel 2015; Mills 2007). It speaks in the tones of white innocence, of we did not know, we were not told (Wekker 2016). The public is able to tell itself that race does not matter because the West has sidelined Indigenous and Black perspectives and treated the knowledges of the majority of the world as inferior.
This is illustrated by Aboriginal (Munanjahli) and South Sea Islander scholar Chelsea Bond’s contribution to a 2019 event held at Melbourne’s La Trobe University titled ‘Has Racism in Contemporary Australia Entered the Political Mainstream?’ The event was originally pitched as a debate between the former Race Discrimination Commissioner and the director of a conservative think-tank, and had the title ‘Does Australia Still Have a Serious Racism Problem?’ This was changed after an open letter challenging it was signed by 170 people. The failure to include the perspectives of Aboriginal or other racialized women led to Bond being invited to speak. She unrelentingly reminded the audience that, despite Aboriginal people’s expertise on matters of race, her inclusion was an afterthought and her placement last on the line-up of speakers revealed how little respect is given to Black scholarship in Australia.
Allen Elbourne, a husband, father, and Pacific Islander migrant activist, told me that Bond’s words reminded him of those of African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde, who, incongruously, we agreed, had been invited to address a women’s writing conference held in 1985 to mark the 150th anniversary of the foundation of Victoria, ‘an Australian State built upon racism, destruction, and a borrowed sameness’ (Lorde 2017: 63). Both Bond and Lorde refused to be manipulated for the whitewashing of racial-colonial history. ‘Australian history has more than a racial dimension,’ Bond said. ‘Race has been foundational to this country, it arrived on the ships in 1788,’ she continued, thus instantly undoing the thinking that made it possible to consider racism a matter for debate (La Trobe University 2019).
Lorde, in her address, expressed puzzlement as to why she had been brought to address the sea of white women before her when her sister Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women had been left out. She recalled the ‘terrible amount of Wurundjeri women’s blood [that] has already been shed in order for you to sit and write here’ (Lorde 2017: 65). She told her audience that ‘it would be an error to believe that we mean the same experience, the same commitment, the same future, unless we agree to examine the history and the particular passions that lie beneath each other’s words’ (Lorde 2017: 64). Neither Lorde nor Bond accepted that history can be put aside even in the laudable aim of finding common ground, and neither guilt nor romanticism, as Lorde put it, would be of any use to that end. Both were clearly stating facts, not appealing to white benevolence. I heard them both echoed in Frantz Fanon, who in his collection of previously unpublished writings, Alienation and Freedom remarked,
If we can point to a sterile approach, then it is one that consists, for an oppressed person, in trying to speak to the ‘heart’ of his oppressors: history contains no example of a dominant power yielding to the tongue-lashings, however reasonable and moving, of those that it crushes; against material interests, sentiments and good sense are never heard. (Fanon 2018: 637)
The obstinance of white denial and ‘not racism’ reveals this unbendable truth. Fanon, Lorde, and Bond lay bare the futility of meeting each act of violence, every narrative of ‘great replacement’, of cultural incompatibility, ethnicized extremism, dual loyalty, insidious influence, genetic propensity, resource finiteness, or white anxiety with an appeal for more band-aids in the form of diversity fests, inquests, and promises to do better. There is no will to know, there is only the will to defend and obfuscate.
‘This is a war for control, this is a war for the little guy,’ says white ideologue Steve Bannon.2 As we have seen, too many social and political scientists, psychologists, journalists, and mainstream politicians choose to respond to this declaration of violence with an appeal for compassion for discomfited white people. They present this as a non-racial response, as a way of de-escalating what they interpret as ‘complex race relations’, as though there were two equal parts at play with right and wrong on ‘both sides’, as Donald Trump put it after white supremacists marched on Charlottesville. This textbook example of ‘white innocence’ is steeped in the racial logic it will not admit. It equates to choosing whiteness, the very category race was installed to establish, defend, and maintain. Nonetheless, the pretence that none of this is about race is most disturbingly portrayed as being better for everyone, including those racialized as other than white.
In conclusion, let us imagine that a time has been reached when race and the discourses and forms of governance created in its name are a thing of the past, when structural white advantage has been dismantled, and when racist discrimination and violence no longer occur. At such a time, we might hear stories about the meanings of race and of how it was addressed, fought against, and overcome. An interesting story might unfurl. In this story, studying the history of race and discussing its effects would not equate to simplifying more complex processes, as many think it does today. It would mean opening a door to a history that, although crucial to the formation of the modern world system, has largely been treated as a special interest topic, or a drum endlessly beaten by those who just won’t move on.
Unfortunately, however, if we are attentive to how it works, we need race as a tool of analysis to interpret other structures of power – capitalism, gender, sexuality, class, and ability – as fully as possible also. The simple question remains: how can we dismantle race without studying it? We need to strip back the façade and reveal the building blocks of the ‘master’s house’ in order to understand how it was built. I therefore insist that being critically attentive to race is political. It is possible to use race as an analytical tool without regressing to the separatist margins, as many on the left would have it. This is not easy, and it is much easier not to do so. But we cannot do away with race yet. We cannot get to an end point before running a course whose finish line is still out of sight.
Ignoring race and denying that it matters or reaching for euphemisms that comfort white anxieties will not make race matter any less than it does.
Note, however, that this is not a pessimistic ending. The critical conversations that need to happen about race are happening. Blacks and Arabs, Muslims and Jews, First Nations and African-American people, Aboriginal and Muslim people, any other cross-cut of this and everyone with refugees. We are talking, and white people committed to the dismantling of racial advantage are participating too. The talk can often be fraught with the tensions produced by a racial-colonial system which hierarchizes and divides. However, it is here that the difficult things are being said. This is a politics that Stuart Hall would have described as having no guarantees (S. Hall 2017). There are no sureties, no strategies to follow that will ensure a desired outcome. What can be guaranteed is that ignoring race and denying that it matters or reaching for euphemisms that comfort white anxieties will not make race matter any less than it does. Race still matters and this is not acceptable. Objections alone will not make race matter any less. What does matter is what we are doing to make it not matter in the future.