Part V

Anti-racisms

Introduction
We noted in earlier parts of the Handbook that any rounded analysis of contemporary racisms
needs to address the role of anti-racism, both in terms of its ideological forms and political
practices. This is the focus of the three chapters that we have included in this part.
The opening chapter by Manuela Bojadžijev serves as a good starting point because it
begins by outlining a broad overview of the history and contemporary forms of anti-racism.
Bojadžijev begins her account by discussing historical struggles against racism, particularly in
the context of labour history, in the colonial context, and in migration struggles. The chap­
ter then moves on to discuss the changing role contemporary anti-racisms, focusing particu­
larly on the ways that an understanding of anti-racism can help us to make sense of the
complex expressions of racism in the contemporary global environment. In the concluding
part of the chapter Bojadžijev argues that theoretical discussions about racism must therefore
not only include anti-racist practices in theoretical analysis and critique, but also include con­
flicts that go beyond resistance to racism in which struggles and critiques are not necessarily
articulated as anti-racist.
This is followed by the chapter by Jehonathan Ben, David Kelly and Yin Paradies that
explores what we know about effective practice for combating racism, racial prejudice and
racial/ethnic discrimination. The core part of the chapter examines interventions that have
resulted in measurable reductions in racism and related outcomes, with a focus on intergroup
contact. The chapter then moves on to discuss what it sees as the key issues in ensuring effective
practice, namely training and education, communications and media campaigns and organisa­
tional development. The chapter then discusses what it sees as ‘backlash effects’, where anti-
racism approaches can unintentionally increase racism. It then concludes with an overview of
emerging anti-racism strategies and recommendations for future research directions.
The following chapter, by Kristine Aquino, seeks to explore the role of anti-racism within
everyday life. This chapter draws on research on anti-racism in everyday life and highlights how
it contributes to broader anti-racism theory and praxis. Aquino provides a discussion of research
on micro dimensions of historical social movements and epochs, doing anti-racism in organisa­
tional contexts, negotiating cultural difference and countering racism in spaces of encounter and
victims developing cultural repertoires to cope with racism. The chapter then highlights some of
the central objectives of this scholarship which involve enhancing understandings of how the
everyday is an integral part of processes that configure and challenge racism.

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The concluding chapter is by Rashawn Ray and Genesis Fuentes and is focused more
specifically on anti-racist activism and its changing role. The chapter aims to provide
a framework for theoretically informing, empirically evaluating, and practically approaching
anti-racism activism. The chapter draws upon critical race theory and the public health crit­
ical race praxis. Ray and Fuentes seek to establish what they see as a racially-inclusive socio­
logical imagination framework to better formulate a typology for engaging in anti-racism
activism. The chapter then uses policing in the United States as a case to illuminate the per­
vasive ways that structural racism permeates a social institution such as the criminal justice
system. It suggests that the racially-inclusive sociological imagination framework to show to
how to reduce implicit biases, identify trust points, and create brave spaces. The broad
objective of the chapter is to provide a theoretical, empirical, and practical template to
engage in scholar-activism from a comprehensive perspective that is theoretically-driven and
empirically informative.

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 15
Anti-racism as method
Manuela Bojadžijev

Racism as episteme and the global condition

The editors of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, founded in 1978, Martin Bulmer and
John Solomos, produced a special issue in 2018 looking back on 40 years of publishing
about race and racism that provocatively asked: ‘Why do we still talk about race?’ (Bulmer
and Solomos 2018). Emphasising the Anglophone, primarily US and UK context, in a few
paragraphs they outlined the development of racism scholarship in the United States from
the early twentieth century to the present before finally diagnosing a changed research land­
scape. Here they searched for a current, historically specific form of racism, of ‘the produc­
tion and reproduction of an episteme’ (ibid., 7) which structures – and here I generalise
their statement – ‘the ideological production of categories relating to oneself and the consti­
tution and comprehension of the Other’ (ibid.). This ideological production, they claimed,
must at the same time be continuously instituted and maintained in order to persist.
In my view, foregrounding the role of institutions and the maintenance of racism as episteme
hints at a deeper insight into contemporary formations of racism. Racism as episteme refers to
more than a set of knowledges, for an episteme must be understood as the very historical
grounding of knowledge and the conditions of its possibility, or as Michel Foucault writes in
The Order of Things, ‘expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’ (Foucault 2002
[1966], 183). He would later elaborate on the episteme in ‘Truth and Power’ as ‘the strategic
apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible
those that will be acceptable’ (Foucault 1980, 197). Bulmer and Solomos thus emphasise the
necessity of a ‘historical reflexivity about the historical background to the emergence of
modern racism’, reaching a rather drastic diagnosis of our times when speaking of our ‘failure
to come to terms with the transformations of racial ideologies and practices over time and
space’ (Bulmer and Solomos 2018, 8). To be clear: in my understanding, ‘over time and space’
refers to the global scale of racism(s). I would suggest that we also need to speak of
a variegated global space in which racism operates and produces and reproduces at the same
time, one we are still struggling to research and understand in its full scope and variety. In
speaking of a variegated global space, I borrow from urban geographers Neil Brenner, Jamie
Peck, and Nick Theodore (2010) to stress the relational dimension of racist diversity, maintain­
ing the heterogeneity of racist articulations and practices as an uneven process across the
world.

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Alongside such geographies, racism as an episteme also refers to temporalities of racisms, i.e.
the periodisation of racist discourses that itself constitutes a contested field of scholarly debate
in terms of to what extent we can make plausible generalising accounts of trending conjunc­
tures of racism. Take, for example, the current inflation of the concept when it comes to dif­
ferent manifestations of racisms in different parts of the world (anti-Muslim racism, anti-Roma,
anti-Semitism, xenophobia, hatred towards refugees or migrant labour, racism against indigen­
ous people). Talking about xenophobia, for example, and continuing to use ethnicity, if not as
a given empirical then as an analytical category, aims at an understanding of ethnicity as
a social construction, of why a belief in the existence of ethnicity persists and why people
organise their lives and relationships accordingly. But this also means that ethnicity continues
to function as a signifier, albeit in inverted form, leading to some discretion in the interpret­
ation of racism. During the era of biologically grounded racism (which as we know is not
over) it still appeared as if ethnicity could theoretically unify various racisms like anti-Semitism
and ‘colonial racism’ – as if they were subject to a hierarchical and spatially organised pattern
of different cultures, a linearly determined notion of progress, a preference for purity over
hybridity, etc. Such certainty has grown more complicated with the analysis of ‘differential’ or
‘neo-racism’ since the 1950s, and with the global variegated scale on which racisms operate.
The loss of analytical sharpness in understanding the essence of racism, I would argue, has to
do with the influence of the critique of racism and anti-racist practice.
We know that knowledge of racism (as can be found, for example, in anti-racist practices)
is trans-disciplinarily informed in that it is knowledge established across fields and struggles.
Moreover, it has developed different sets of problematisation, formulating questions which
are meaningful and therefore possible within a certain organisation of discourse, and, correla­
tively, identifying objects which are either visible or invisible for a certain ‘experience’
informed by this discourse. Perhaps more importantly, the episteme always has another side,
if you will, in which it is questioned as a set of theories and practices, signalling the conflict­
ual dimension of any given knowledge/episteme. This is to say that every episteme – even
racism – has its limits. This is where I think transgression lies, even if it means that racism
does not dissolve but rather becomes something else, something transformed in comparison
to what we ‘knew’ up to that point.
When we try to understand such morphologies, I argue, it is precisely because practical
forms of resistance to racism have gained strength and work on different memories, on dif­
ferent histories of racism, and anti-racism has brought the differences between various politics
and experiences of racism to the fore. It is at this historical moment that the controversies
about whether one form of racism has alternated with another in the past and present or will
alternate in the future become acute, as Etienne Balibar appropriately remarked. The ques­
tion of racism’s essence and the unity of the term thus arises (see Balibar 2005, 22). Bulmer’s
and Solomos’s diagnosis of the ‘failure to come to terms with the transformations of racial
ideologies and practices over time and space’, which I share and believe is widely shared,
may then have to do with the fact that why we even call racism ‘racism’ in the first place
has been contested. Along these lines Balibar, in his article ‘Difference, Otherness, Exclusion’
(2005), rightly noted that it is precisely the numerous uses, denunciations, and critiques of
racism – the current transformations of social conditions in which racism develops into prac­
tices and discourses and changes into other formations – which have made the term so
ambiguous that its origin, its unity, its ability to summarise various phenomena and manifest­
ations is called into question. In theoretical terms such an approach presents us with an epis­
temological paradox: we do not presuppose racism, but we must state that it has existed for
a very long time. Therefore, if we focus our investigation on a specific understanding of the

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constitution of racism, analysing the reasons why racism persists and appears so resistant to
critique, then arguments often blur into an area where it is no longer clear whether we are
theorising racism at all. That is why I take this diagnosis and predicament as an invitation to
think of an epistemological way, a method, to come to terms with transformations of
‘ideologies and practices’.
In this contribution I attempt to delineate and critically assess the contributions made to
anti-racism, yet it would be impossible to truly do so given the vast histories and stories of
anti-racist practices across the world, or the theoretical knowledge that has organically devel­
oped from them. Rather, my turn to method is motivated by a desire to unravel the variety,
renewal, and overall mixed profile of new and persisting forms and practices of racism. There­
fore, while we can say that the foundations of anti-racism are being renewed through globalis­
ing processes, the struggle is waged on an extremely wide and varied front and scale, in
microforms, and is yet to be further theorised. Confusion over method of inquiry is wide­
spread in this context. The following question must then be posed: method of inquiry for
what and for whom, and why is the question of method so urgent today? I would suggest that
the answers can be found in the realities of the conflicts that racism constitutes and that
emerge in anti-racist practices. The implications of such assumptions are deep, as they signify
the need to bring historical and political experiences back into consideration in order to draw
methodological conclusions for our times, when racism appears ever on the rise. The question
of method may help to ask: how do we effectively encounter racism? How can our studies be
guided towards that purpose? What experiences can we draw on today? Where are those
deposits where experiences are contained in congealed form? How can we find them? How
do we detect those insurgent ideas and experiences, the ‘minor knowledges’ (Foucault), so to
speak, among the layers of social archives and memory? The overall aim of this contribution is
to foreground the advantages of an analysis of global racism formations to investigate resistance,
flight paths, and return to where anti-racism has effectively encountered racism.
By insisting on such an approach I am aware that these have already existed in the geneal­
ogy of racism scholarship, but suggest that we should return to them in times when it may
no longer suffice to only add another crisis analysis, explaining to each other the secrets of
this specific domination (Hage 2016, 126) – although I still consider this intellectual practice
to be absolutely necessary. Rather, I argue that in times of transformation we must return to
the archives of previous encounters of anti-racism. Anti-racism as method therefore suggests
two simultaneous moves: drawing on such archives helps to learn from historical experiences
of success and defeat, and moreover may open a perspective in which we develop our
knowledge and analysis of racism from concrete conflicts constituted through racism.

Racism as social relation

Relational approaches to understanding racism (Fanon 1952, 1965 [1959], 1961, 1969;
Balibar 1988; Goldberg 2009; Hall 2016; Hage 2016, 2017) have been helpful in understand­
ing racist conditioning in its complexity and as it travels across the globe, and not only
because they state that racism is not a question of individual racist subjects (Balibar 1988).
Theo Goldberg more fully elaborates on the topologies and linkages, ‘causally or symbolic­
ally, ideationally or semantically’, of a relational understanding of racism when he points out,
firstly, that the way we know and institutionalise racism, how it is expressed and conceptual­
ised, is not only local, and therefore cannot be understood in comparative perspective, but
rather relational, as racism ‘circulates in wider circles of meaning and practice’ (Goldberg
2009, 174). He also reminds us of the historical and material process underlying the

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constitutive connections in-built into racism when he writes: ‘The globalization of the racial
is predicated on the understanding that racial thinking and its resonances […] racial ordering,
racist institutional arrangement and racial control were key instruments of colonial govern-
mentality and control’ (Goldberg 2009, 1275). He aims for a ‘cartography of reiterative
impacts, of their transformations and redirections’ (ibid., 1279). Secondly, he claims we must
understand the globalisation of the racial in terms of its inter-local pervasion, i.e. when
‘racial thinking and racism “here” gets (support) from “there”’. Drawing on this line of argu­
ment allows for a conception of how historical conditions led to the emergence of our
global racialised world in the first place, and reminds us of the desire to understand the
unfinished decolonisation process that intensified in many parts of Europe and the US
through anti-racist conflicts.
Three aspects strike me as central to understanding the globalisation of the racial: firstly,
racism must be seen as a mutually dependent process in tandem with the expansion of the
capitalist world market through colonialism, marked until today by deep inequalities, uneven
development, and incessant economic extraction as well as cultural hybridisation that con­
tinually produces new cultural differentiations. Secondly, this history is as much an integral
part of world history and the present as it is of Europe. It is an ambivalent story in which
the conceivable unity of the world was always linked to intellectual projects seeking to inte­
grate the tendencies of world-ing and localising practices, while at the same time linked
inseparably to the constellations of a post-colonial situation. Finally, as Goldberg points out
when he speaks of the constitutional conditions of colonialism, this development was and is
always characterised by a material practice, to which I would like to add both the forced and
the more or less voluntary mobility of people who have been described by quite a few com­
mentators – among them Aimé Césaire – in relation to migration to Europe after
the Second World War as a ‘retorsion effect’ of colonialism, and finally and decisively by the
very processes of decolonisation that created the one world in which we live today.
Building on this, conjunctures of racism as determined in relation to social struggles thus,
and most importantly, require an understanding based on struggles against racism rather than
on subjects constituted by racism (Bojadžijev 2008). For a relational theory of racism
I believe that three more aspects must be combined. Firstly, we need to do more than just
emphasise the strategic effect of the relationship inherent in racism, i.e. its functionality in
the relations of power. Secondly, it will not suffice to understand the reorganisation of
racism, i.e. the effects of struggles against racism on each historically specific formation of
racism. Thirdly, it is in fact always a matter of also working out the institutional and main­
taining modes of regulating these struggles, which in turn have an effect on the determin­
ation, i.e. the subjectivation, of those subjected to racism. In short, racism does not exist
outside the history of its constitution and reproduction, and like all ideological formations is
based, to borrow a phrase from Louis Althusser, on an interplay of a double constitution,
constituting and constituted at the same time (Althusser 1971).
An analysis of racism therefore cannot fail to consider the historical process of how,
when, and why racism transforms. Analysing this has been the task of historiographies of
social struggles framed by racism. Such historiographies provide accounts of the forms of
racist subjectification. They do so, I would say, in a double sense of reconstructing the per­
severance and tenacity of those resisting racism who constitute themselves as subjects in the
social conflicts, but also offering a sense of the history of their subjugation. The deep insight
such accounts provide is that racialised subjects exist as a group for as long as they exist
under conditions that make them one. This invites a reverse assumption: that as long as they
exist, there will be conflict. Such a relational theory of racism would prove that struggles

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repeatedly force racism to reorganise itself, sometimes with the aim of ultimately removing
the basis of its reinstitution and maintenance.
History has always been an important resource and terrain of anti-racist imagination and
action for relational accounts, which is why I now turn to historiographies of labour, migra­
tion, and racism. Such accounts usually provide the grounds for a conversation across time
and space, reading racialised politics in different parts of the world through the history of
a whole variety of social struggles such as anti-colonial struggle, labour politics, or struggles
of migration. They help constitute a way of thinking about politics and its subjects that is
radically different from essentialising conceptions of these issues, for they strictly limit the
scope of strategic essentialism to historical instances.

‘Singular histories’ of anti-racism

First, I discuss three international histor(iograph)y cases. The first is part of the US labour
history tradition and deals with the slavery era. The second is the seminal work of Frantz
Fanon, whose understanding of anti-racism in the colonial context was decisive for many
who followed. The last case turns to post-war European history, specifically France, the UK,
and Germany. Combining these approaches enables me to gain an overview of social strug­
gles against racism in different social formations, all of which were influential in developing
relational concepts of racism, provided insights into historical conjunctures of racism, and
were influential in understanding racism from the perspective of struggles against it.

Labour history, racism, and class

The social labour history field in both the US and Europe exhibits a number of studies focused
on racism and class (cf. among others Tabili 1994; Ignatiev 1995; Mills 1997; Jacobson 1998;
Roediger 1999, 1994, 2005, 2017; Bojadžijev 2008; Virdee 2014). At least historically, it
makes sense to link the theme of racism with the question of struggles against exploitation.
David R. Roediger’s contribution to this field is particularly noteworthy. In the introduction
to his most recent book, Class, Race, and Marxism (2017), Roediger takes up the current
debate’s fundamental problem when discussing the political intersections between anti-capitalist
movements such as Occupy Wall Street and struggles against racism, as currently manifested in
the protests against police violence within the framework of the Black Lives Matter move­
ment. Roediger’s political positions reject the ongoing polarisation between arguments for or
against the political primacy of anti-capitalist struggles over ‘identity-related’ ones. Even if they
do not directly formulate anti-capitalist goals, identity-related struggles must, according to
Roediger, be understood as part of the class struggle because they both attack the fundamental
logic of social inequality in capitalist societies and offer the possibility of innovatively combin­
ing different forms of political struggle. This argumentation is not new, but has in fact been
repeated remarkably often. We need only think of Stuart Hall’s (1980) earlier work in line
with investigations that studied race and class in articulation. In ‘Race, articulation and societies
structured in dominance’ he elaborated a concept seeking to develop an integrated analysis of
the structuring and manufacturing of racialised social divisions with economic, political, ideo­
logical, and cultural dimensions. Hall developed a materialist approach to understanding racism
with a historically concrete analysis of distinctive racial aspects (Hall 1980, 336).
Building upon this vast literature, I would like to highlight one particular contribution
that stands out for its analysis of the relationship between class and racism, dealing with it

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in the context of the transformation of capitalism and its inherent history of forced migra­
tion: the transatlantic history of slavery. It offers me the opportunity to discuss
a methodological and analytical framework for anti-racism as method. The work in ques­
tion is Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume study The Invention of the White Race (1997), in
which he conducts a historical comparison between the colonisation of Catholic Ireland from
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and the enslavement of black workers on Virginia’s
tobacco plantations.
A number of works in the line of Allen attempt to determine the functioning of racism for
the conditions of exploitation they examine in the struggles of slaves and indentured labour in
Atlantic colonial history. This was a time when industrialisation asserted itself, and historically
coincided with the effective restitution of the plantation economy in the transition to cotton
cultivation. Allen’s work is chosen for typological reasons and as an example of a historiography
that successfully puts struggles of labour, everyday life, racism, and forced migration into context
and describes significant historical moments. In reflecting on these contributions, I focus not so
much on reconstructions of the struggles themselves as on the methodology, foregrounding how
the constellation of racism, migration, and class struggle is conceptualised in the work.
Allen’s work is indicative here in that it provides a historical analysis of struggles in the
context of racist oppression and exploitation, implying a critical theory of racism. In particu­
lar, Allen’s investigation and analysis of historical documents is influenced and informed by
the civil rights movements of the twentieth century (cf. Allen 1997). As Allen demonstrates
in his analogy of Irish and American history, racism cannot simply be traced back to the
workings of phenotypic characteristics or an analysis thereof. Rather, he emphasises that
a deconstructivist analysis or a historical view alone is not enough to prove this. What is so
fascinating in his investigation is that he links back to moments when the institutional differ­
entiation and definition of ‘white’ and ‘black’ begins in US history. Allen’s concept of social
control is based on a socio-theoretical consideration that analyses racist oppression in the
context of class struggle and the struggles of slaves and indentured labour. In this way, it
becomes clear how the relationship that generated this system of oppression is built, insti­
tuted, and maintained. Furthermore, Allen’s analysis supports a relational theory of racism
according to which racism organises and intermittently reorganises itself in relation to strug­
gles against racist oppression. He shows how state measures and institutions constitute racism
in everyday life by issuing various decrees that themselves can be read as a response to rebel­
lions. His work’s strength is that he abandons simplistic comparisons and blurs contradictions
when tracing the existence of class solidarity where barriers of ‘white’ and ‘black’ were trans­
gressed before they were legally codified in response to such collective action. This turn to
investigating historical solidarity avant la lettre does not, as a common line of doubt claims,
give priority to the class struggle or a presupposed unity of the working class. The opposite
is rather the case, for Allen’s intention is specifically to understand how racist oppression
takes on an intrinsic form that cannot be eliminated by reflecting on the class struggle, but
requires solidarity. It is only in the precise historical description of this development that it
becomes possible to show how the forces of power shift historically and makes drastically
clear that from the moment of legal distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ struggles can no
longer side-step making structural and institutional (in this case racist) lines of division their
starting point if they are to succeed at all.
Moreover, what becomes clear in these historical accounts is that there can be no general
theory of racism. Rather, according to Allen it can only be understood as a fundamental
system of rule whose economic and political constitutional conditions must be precisely

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specified. He thus chooses a form of analysis that could be described as the ‘singular history’
of racism (cf. Balibar 1988, 40) in order to determine the conjuncture.

Temporalities of anti-racism in the context of colonialism

The notion that racism has assumed new historical configurations since roughly the mid-twentieth
century has been emphasised many times. Frantz Fanon was one of the first to identify this shift in
his lecture ‘Racism and Culture’ at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956:

Racism has not managed to harden. It has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change
its appearance. It has had to undergo the fate of the cultural whole that informed
it. […] These old-fashioned positions tend in any case to disappear. This racism that
aspires to be rational, individual, genotypically and phenotypically determined, becomes
transformed into cultural racism.
(Fanon 1967, 32)

In addition to his theoretical reflections on racism as a sociogeny, influenced by his psychi­

atric practice and participation in anti-colonial struggles as a member of the Algerian
National Liberation Front (FLN) and editor of its journal, Fanon also provided historical-
theoretical considerations in the context of the Algerian anti-colonial liberation movement
conceptualising the relationship between racism and anti-racist practices. Proceeding from
French colonialism, Fanon distinguished between three phases particularly with regard to the
practices of colonised intellectuals and in terms of racist subjectification, which he ideal-
typically identified in The Wretched of the Earth (originally published in French in 1961 as Les
damnés de la terre) and elaborated in other writings.
In Aspects of the Algerian Revolution, first published in 1966 as Sociologie d’une révolution,
Fanon makes changes in everyday conditions the starting point of his analysis and gives an idea
of how quotidian practices can be conceived of in the context of racism and decolonisation.
Fanon depicts the ‘self-consciousness of the people’ transcending the colonial situation, their
subjectivity as changing and changed social practice which at the same time questions power
relations among the colonised themselves. The possibility of this arises between the layers of
time from which colonialism is composed. Fanon shows what liberation could look like under
colonisation and in this sense demands that ‘people’ have to change at the same moment ‘in
which they change the world’, because their liberation struggle ultimately aims at ‘a fundamen­
tal reorganization of the relations between people’ (Fanon 1969, 14). Liberation, we can con­
clude, lies in liberation from subjectification. Towards the end of Black Skin, White Masks he
reminds us that ‘the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. […] I am a part
of Being to the degree that I go beyond it’ (Fanon 2008 [1952], 179).
Thus, Fanon’s work combines many relevant aspects for anti-racism as method: firstly, his
insistence on what today would be called a trans-disciplinary approach by operating historic­
ally, socially, culturally, and psychologically at the same time. Secondly, the question of the
possibilities and limits of a reference to history permeated by racism for those who want to
free themselves from it. Thirdly, the problem of not thinking of history as mere progress,
thus, the non-timelessness of his or anyone’s writings. And finally, the question of how
change is possible under such conditions of colonial violence, without creating an abstract
statement but analysing the material practices of de-subjectification in history.
The reception of Fanon’s work is quite ambivalent in the sense that he was a theoretical
role model for highly diverse projects over the course of history. Although Fanon’s influence

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on Cultural Studies and Post-Colonial Studies has been enormous, here it is precisely his
theoretical ambivalence, the rejection of clear-cut attributions and pure categories that are
deployed – or, as Paul Gilroy put it, his ‘reparative humanity’ (2011, 14). Interestingly,
Gilroy (2010) recently returned to the writings of Fanon (and Améry), attacking their
domestication ‘by timid, often parochial fields like “critical race theory” and “postcolonial
theory”’ (ibid., 17). He reminded readers of the changed political situation as a result of the
‘war on terror’ in tandem with the ‘uneven effects’ of the financial and debt crisis post-2008,
as well as the impact of technological innovations in warfare, suggesting: ‘It may be greater
if his [Fanon’s, MB] ideas can be reapplied carefully to managing challenges that are tied up
in the lives of the often traumatized incomers (migrants) who are expected to bring the
global insurgency alive on the fertile soil of their racialized exclusion from the dreamscapes
of indentured consumerism’ (2010, 21).

Migration struggles
I will pick up on this reference to the ‘incomers’ and go to a very different example that
takes us to Europe and the crisis of Fordism to examine traditions and efforts in the self­
organisation of migrants across Europe. This section is dedicated to the analyses of Mogniss
Abdallah and Abdelmalek Sayad in France, Satnam Virdee’s analysis of ‘racialised outsiders’
in the UK (2014), and some reference to my own (2008) and Serhat Karakayali’s work in
Germany. All of these works investigate conditions and struggles of migration. They deal
with important stages in conflicts arising through migration and serve as exemplary points of
orientation both methodologically and in terms of substance. The history of mobile popula­
tions receives a different rhythm and nuanced understanding if read as the history of its
struggles and not focused solely on changes to immigration legislation and regulations. All
contributions tell this story from the perspective of migrants and their political and everyday
struggles, which is particularly important given how common the erasure of those conflicts
from labour history narratives is. They deserve special attention in that they address migrant
forms of self-organisation, i.e. those that were formed autonomously rather than within
existing trade unions, organisations, or parties.
For France, Abdallah’s book J’y suis, j’y reste! Les luttes de l’immigration en France depuis les
années soixante (‘I’m here, I’ll stay! The struggles of immigration in France since the 1960s’,
2001) provides a good understanding of the different currents, themes, and debates of
migrant politics in France. Abdallah sums up historical developments in terms of political
engagement and emphasises the collective force that emerges from self-organisation that is
capable of social transformation. Like in Germany, many associations were initially founded
on the basis of national origins (Bojadžijev 2008) to meet the social and cultural needs of
‘immigrant workers’ and offered legal, material, and moral support. They concentrated their
activities on their countries of origin, whose regimes they often opposed. In their public
self-representation they often committed themselves to political neutrality and entrenched
themselves behind cultural activities. However, it should not be underestimated – and this
must be objected to a culturalist historiography of migration – that cultural orientation was
sometimes used (especially since the cultural awakening marked by the revolts in May 1968)
to circumvent the prohibition of migrant politics as regulated by law. Around the same time
in both France and Germany, the late 1960s and early 1970s, new migrant activities came to
the fore which in France were very much about politics, the question of citizenship, and the
right to vote in particular. Working closely with Pierre Bourdieu, Sayad’s posthumously
published volume The Suffering of the Immigrant (2004) emphasises the conditions of migration

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mainly under this aspect, the provisional and legal status of migrants and their children, as
was also the aim of Karakayali’s study (2008) on the historical genealogy of illegal immigra­
tion to Germany. While Sayad focused on the permanent deprivation of rights in migration
and used the term ‘immigrants of the interior’ for the generation born in France, Karakayali’s
work renders the autonomy of migration historically visible without the claim to control
inherent in the governance of migration (ibid., 258).
Abdallah’s perspective on self-organisation also captures the conflicts of quotidian life.
From 1974 to 1980 the residents of the apartment buildings managed by the Société nationale
de construction de logements pour les travailleurs (Sonacotra) went on one of the longest national
tenant strikes in France. As in many European countries at the time, in 1972 the Marcellin-
Fontanet decrees subjected immigration to strict controls aimed at stopping official labour
migration and at the same time called for integration of those considered integrable. Politic­
ally active migrants could thus be tied to the union; trade-union sections for migrants
emerged, but overall the policy sought to integrate immigrants into the homogenously
depicted French workforce (cf. Abdallah 2001, 113). Abdallah speaks of a very close connec­
tion between French workers’ struggles and migrants’ struggles; they were repeatedly able to
place so-called ‘specific demands’ into a broader social context of growing ethnification of
power relations as a whole. Virdee (2014) observed something similar for the UK:

By reading that history through the lens of race, through the eyes of racialized minor­
ities who were present in every one of those moments, we find that race and class were
mutually constitutive in the making of the English working class.
(Virdee 2015, 226f)

Racism itself could thus be understood in all of these studies as a form of social confrontation in
which racism renews itself and contributes to a certain form of social reproduction – instead of
reducing it to the subjects it produces (foreigners vs. French; racialised outsiders vs. English).
All mentioned authors’ assessments refer to their knowledge of historical migration strug­
gles. In this respect they are in agreement with the reflections of Allen or Roediger: they all
investigate the fields of conflict. What Allen describes as the concept of social control, by
which he means constructing a system of rule that enables effective control of the labour
force through social stratification, is reflected in trade-union and state integration policies
which others (Abdallah 2001; Bojadžijev 2008; Virdee 2014) in turn describe. These works
evidence that politics in its dominant form functions recuperatively: it responds to demands
made in struggles by isolating some of them and integrating others. This must not necessarily
be understood as a historical defeat but can be reversed in a historical analysis, for social dis­
putes are in fact inscribed in the reorganisation of racism, politics, and production. This
reorganisation can only be understood with a view to conflict.

Conclusion and possible developments

Following the notion of anti-racism as method, in conclusion we could ask how racism can
be analysed without adopting a perspective in which those affected by racism are seen
merely as victims. To bring these considerations into the present, we need only think of the
countless workers who are referred to as the ‘shadow workforce’ of the tech industry. All
those who work for shiny, global monopolists like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or
Microsoft as contract workers or in subcontracted firms, and who inhabit a number of differ­
ent roles across the industry, including content moderation, serving meals, driving as bike

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and package couriers across cities, cleaning offices, providing security, writing code, and per­
forming click work. First studies show that this workforce is highly mobile and flexible, and
that historically-driven race, class, and gender-based orders and relationships with gentrifica­
tion and growing inequality exist in tech industry contexts (Altenried, Bojadžijev, and Wallis
2017). Additionally, workers tend to become an atomised unit, dispersed across space, their
labour spatially and temporarily reconfigured according to employer’s needs. The end of the
factory as a spatial unity, the introduction of the ‘digital factory’ (Altenried 2017), means for
the individual contractors, that the burden of responsibility for their livelihoods is placed
merely on them. As a result, labour becomes more fragmented, disempowered, and made to
accept lower wages despite intensifying exploitation. Such workers are stereotyped in gen­
dered and racialised ways by their employers, which creates an ambivalent space for both
resistance and at the same time such discrimination prevents them from officially organising.
Employers will attempt to recuperate the worker’s social and cultural customs as assets to the
flexible workplace and process, for example in content moderation (Altenried and Bojadžijev
2017). Many of the women working in electronics manufacturing that Karen Hossfeld
(1995) interviewed already in the 1980s and 1990s in Silicon Valley were resistant to trad­
itional labour unions and generally wary of collective organising. But they did have strategies
for dealing with unreasonable, sexist, and racist superiors. In her analyses she concludes:

For immigrant women workers, a successful organizing movement will be one that
addresses the intersections of class, gender, race, and nationality in their lives,
a movement recognizing that for women […] a work life means not only wage work
but household and community labor, and often includes the struggles associated with
being undocumented. What is needed is an interethnic labor and community movement
that challenges gender and racial oppression as well as dangerous, unstable working con­
ditions in the high-tech industry. And because of the global scope and mobility of the
industry, such a movement must also have an international component.
(Hossfeld 1995, 429–430)

We can learn from such studies that the variegated global spaces of racism and labour that
I have been investigating for this chapter are sometimes encapsulate in local images of the
world. Thus, researching racism under global conditions may lead us back to anti-racism as
method in that we can learn how such space does not only ‘hit the ground’ in concrete
struggles but also teaches us how to understand racism and its morphologies. Those subjected
to racism were and are never only objects and victims, but have defended themselves against
it in various forms and practices. Resistance has historically emerged in direct or indirect,
collective or individual confrontations following certain patterns of identity (as leftists,
according to their origin/religion/racial or ethnic identities, as internationalists). Only in the
rarest of cases did they articulate the question of social change as a question of identity or of
change itself within the respective power relations. They are to be understood as a search for
change in which the conditions for a better life in and against racist situations are found
again and again.
Taking the disquiet in racism scholarship diagnosed at the beginning of this chapter as
a motive and drawing conclusions from the theoretical considerations discussed above, I dare
to put forward a far-reaching thesis for a relational theory of racism: conjunctures of racism
determine, organise, and reorganise themselves in struggle – in social and political confronta­
tions that produce, reproduce, and transform their opponents (which can be manifold) in
their identity and formation. Consequently, and this point has certainly been made by many

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but also questioned by others, one of the constant efforts in undermining racism is to dis­
solve positions of identity. The conjunctures of racism do not depend only on its internal
reproductive capacity – racism’s reorganisation and development is shaped decisively by
those who defend themselves against it. The fight against racism can thus be taken as the
methodological starting point. Racism itself is a form of social confrontation in which it
renews itself and contributes to capitalist development’s complex forms. A theory of racism
must therefore not only include anti-racist practices in theoretical analysis and critique, but
also include conflicts that go beyond resistance to racism in which struggles and critiques are
not necessarily articulated as anti-racist (cf. Bojadžijev 2008). We must therefore always ask
and define: what is the concrete conflict?

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 16
Contemporary anti-racism
A review of effective practice

Jehonathan Ben, David Kelly, and Yin Paradies

Introduction
Anti-racism can be minimally defined as ‘forms of thought and/or practice that seek to con­
front, eradicate and/or ameliorate racism’ (Bonnett, 2000, p. 4) and as ‘ideologies and practices
that affirm and seek to enable the equality of races and ethnic groups’ (Bonnett, 2006,
p. 1099). Anti-racism practice has expanded remarkably over the past decades (Paradies, 2016;
Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). At the same time, evidence as to what works in confronting, eradi­
cating and ameliorating racism, or, complementarily, how to enable and affirm racial/ethnic
equality, remains limited. Paluck (2016, p. 147), for example, asks, ‘What do social scientists
know about reducing prejudice in the world?’ before concluding that we know ‘very little’.
And indeed, relative to the amount of anti-racism work underway, few evaluations have dis­
cerned interventions’ causal effects, limiting our understanding of interventions’ effectiveness.
Real-world field experiments with longitudinal bearings (Paluck & Green, 2009; Paluck,
Green, & Green, 2018) are especially well placed to answer questions about the extent and
manners by which racism may be curbed, but remain particularly uncommon.
In this chapter, we examine research on anti-racism practice, focusing on effective
approaches to tackling racism and interrelated phenomena like prejudice and racial/ethnic dis­
crimination. In focusing on effectiveness, we examine the extent to which interventions pro­
duce measurable, positive changes. We draw especially on recent meta-analyses, reviews, and
experimental (field- and laboratory- based) studies. First, we briefly summarise four central
approaches to tackling racism, and synthesise key findings concerning effective anti-racism
practices per approach as well as across approaches. We then consider the possibility that hin­
drance to anti-racism efforts may come from initiatives themselves, resulting in counterpro­
ductive ‘backlash effects’, and we discuss how these may be avoided. The chapter concludes
with a broader discussion of current knowledge and implications for future research directions.

Approaches to anti-racism
Anti-racism approaches are highly diverse, spanning everything from prejudice reduction to
conflict resolution to collective action (Paradies, 2016); and from reducing the incidence of
racism to empowering racialised subjects to fostering a radical indifference to race (Hage,

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2015). This includes examples such as virtual reality experiments (Banakou, Hanumanthu, &
Slater, 2016) and participatory theatre projects (Sonn et al., 2015). Here we focus on some
of the most commonly used anti-racism approaches and their effectiveness in addressing
racism, namely: (1) intergroup contact; (2) training and education; (3) communications and
media campaigns; and (4) organisational development. These approaches sometimes overlap
or can be used in combination to reinforce one another; organisational development may,
for instance, feature a component of diversity training, while diversity training and media
campaigns may involve a degree of intergroup contact.

Intergroup contact
Intergroup contact is a broad anti-racism approach that has been extensively implemented
and studied, and has arguably become the most important approach for reducing prejudice
(Paluck, Green, & Green, 2018). Grounded in Gordon Allport’s (1954) intergroup contact
theory, it is predicated on five ‘optimal contact conditions’ for successfully reducing inter­
group conflict and increasing harmony: (1) equal status between interacting groups; (2)
common goals between groups; (3) intergroup cooperation; (4) support from authorities,
law, or custom; and (5) situations that allow for developing personal acquaintance and
friendships through meaningful, repeated contact (Al Ramiah & Hewstone, 2013; Pettigrew
& Tropp, 2006). Contact may take direct (face-to-face) or indirect forms (i.e. as imagined,
extended, vicarious or virtual) that can both be effective in reducing prejudice (Brown &
Paterson, 2016). Educational settings like schools and universities are the most popular sites
for intergroup contact interventions, followed by workplaces and organisations, and a host of
other settings (Kalinoski et al., 2013; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006).
Intergroup contact reduces prejudice through various mechanisms. Some of the best-
studied and most important mechanisms include affective processes that decrease inter­
group threat, anxiety and symbolic threat (i.e. anticipating harmful consequences),
enhance self-disclosure, increase empathy and perspective taking, and alter group norms
and social categorisations (Dovidio et al., 2017). The impact of intergroup contact on
attitudes can generalise beyond the individual out-group members encountered and
towards their greater group (Lemmer & Wagner, 2015; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). The
extent to which the individuals encountered (whether directly or indirectly) are perceived
as typical members of the out-group makes generalisation more likely (Al Ramiah &
Hewstone, 2013; Brown & Paterson, 2016; Dovidio et al., 2017). Meta-analyses have
shown that programme effects can persist after the programme has ended (Beelmann &
Heinemann, 2014; Lemmer & Wagner, 2015).
Research demonstrates that the quality/favourability of contact has a stronger effect on
attitudes than contact quantity, while the duration of contact also matters, with sustained
contact becoming more positive over time, up to a point of diminishing returns (Dovidio
et al., 2017). A balanced ratio of majority to minority group members in contact situations
makes contact more effective in reducing prejudice, as it can maximise opportunities for
interaction and reduce perceived intergroup threat (Al Ramiah & Hewstone, 2013). As to
participants, college-aged students are more strongly impacted compared to adults (Pettigrew
& Tropp, 2006), and participants who are highly prejudiced and/or for whom contact
experiences are relatively novel may be more strongly impacted as having ample room for
attitudinal change (Al Ramiah & Hewstone, 2013). While meeting Allport’s conditions for
optimal contact is associated with greater prejudice reduction, not all conditions may be
required to reduce prejudice, and contact may not always lead to positive attitudes, whereas

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the attitudes of majority group members toward minority group members are often more
strongly affected than vice versa (e.g. Dovidio et al., 2017; Pedersen et al., 2011; Ülger
et al., 2017).

Anti-racism training and education

Various anti-racism initiatives use forms of education and training to enhance cultural com­
petency or challenge discrimination, often at workplaces and schools. The most common
intervention is diversity training, which draws on programmes that aim to increase positive
intergroup behaviours and decrease prejudice or discrimination towards (perceived) out-
group members (Pendry, Driscoll, & Field, 2007, p. 29). Training can decrease discrimin­
atory attitudes and beliefs among most participants, but disturbingly can also increase them for
a small, yet sizeable group (Paradies et al., 2009).
A meta-analysis of curricular and co-curricular diversity-related activities found they had
moderate effect in reducing racial bias, where effects were stronger for white students com­
pared with non-white students (Denson, 2009). Another meta-analysis of diversity training
programmes, of which over a third focused on race, ethnicity, culture and/or religion, found
considerable effects on cognitive-based and skill-based outcomes, and somewhat smaller effects
on affective-based outcomes (Kalinoski et al., 2013). Other reviews have been less supportive
of diversity training. A recent review suggests that training ‘can lead to both positive and nega­
tive social justice outcomes’, including studies that find that training can both reduce and
increase discrimination (Alhejji et al., 2016, p. 5). A review of the impact of diversity training
on management composition in private organisations found that it was generally ineffective in
increasing the share of black American managers (Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006).
Discussing effective manners of training and education, several studies stress the importance
of explicitly discussing racism, within a safe space for open and frank dialogue (Paradies et al.,
2009; Pedersen et al., 2011). Bezrukova, Jehn, and Spell (2012) point to effective aspects of
diversity training such as using multiple instruction methods, and integrating training as part of
systematic, planned organisational development rather than as standalone components. Focus­
ing on participants from a range of racial/ethnic/cultural/religious backgrounds was deemed
more effective than focusing on a specific group (Bezrukova, Jehn, & Spell, 2012; Paradies
et al., 2009). In workplaces, engaging managers in promoting diversity, propelling them to
increase their contact with members of different out-groups and encouraging their account­
ability are effective in reducing bias and increasing workplace diversity (Dobbin & Kalev,
2016). Both voluntary and compulsory training may be effective under certain situations.
Although both have been subject to critique, for example for ‘preaching to the converted’
when voluntary, or for inducing resistance when forced (Bezrukova, Jehn, & Spell, 2012;
Dobbin & Kalev, 2016).
To be effective, training should be neutral and informal, and provide accurate information
about the out-group based on multiple disciplines, preferably using multiple instruction
methods (e.g. readings, audio-visuals, small group discussion and role plays) (Pedersen et al.,
2011; Torino, 2015). Training should be tailored to each organisation, linked to operational
goals, and specifically address behaviour, while trainers should engage participants respectfully
and interactively, build and invoke social norms, enhance awareness, attitudes and skills, and
encourage intergroup contact where appropriate. They preferably should be ‘insiders’, from
various racial/ethnic/cultural backgrounds, and with experience and/or qualifications in
organisational change (Paradies et al., 2009).

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Communications and media campaigns

Communications and media campaigns against racism usually consist of large-scale initiatives
drawing on various media forms and platforms, sometimes use social marketing techniques,
and are frequently assessed via experiments (naturalistic and lab-based). Media and communi­
cations can aggravate stereotyping, prejudice and discriminatory behaviour towards different
racial/ethnic groups (Willard, Isaac, & Carney, 2015), but they can also raise awareness of
race-based discrimination, impact attitudes and behaviours, and help develop or strengthen
positive social norms (Paluck & Green, 2009; Paradies et al., 2009).
Although many ‘real-life’ campaigns exist, their impact has rarely seen rigorous assessment
(Donovan & Vlais, 2006). A review of 13 media interventions addressing different forms of
prejudice that used field experiments, noted that interventions were mostly conducted in
schools and showed ‘suggestive’ results in their impact on empathy, perspective taking and
social norms, as well as on using narratives for persuasive purposes (Paluck & Green, 2009).
Other reviews have portrayed a similarly mixed picture of the effectiveness of anti-racism
campaigns using communications and social marketing approaches to reduce discrimination
and support diversity (Aboud et al., 2012; Donovan & Vlais, 2006; Rankine, 2014).
Popular racism-reduction methods that rely on audio-visual media (e.g. television and
film) are vicarious and imagined intergroup contact (i.e. observing or imagining other people
in intergroup contact situations) (Cadenas et al., 2018; Murrar & Brauer, 2018). Vicarious
contact may produce constructive perceptions of the out-group and positive emotional
responses towards them. It may capitalise on exposure to typical, favourable and salient
counter-stereotypical media exemplars, and on identification with in-group characters that
engage in positive contact. Other initiatives provide new information to challenge existing
stereotypes and norms, or invoke emotions that are conducive to tackling prejudice (e.g.
empathy). Studies assessing the impact of such media forms, often in laboratory contexts
demonstrate mixed findings (e.g. Castelli et al., 2012; Igartua & Frutos, 2017; Vittrup &
Holden, 2011).
Communications campaigns have stronger effects when they address specific negative
beliefs rather than focus on generating positive feelings, and when focusing on various indi­
viduals from one ethnic/racial group at the time rather than promote broad purposes like
‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ (Donovan & Vlais, 2006). To increase their effectiveness,
campaigns should identify beliefs that underlie expressions of racism, challenge racism and
promote anti-racism as a prescriptive norm, and highlight perceived, appreciated similarities
between groups, especially where negative beliefs are based on ignoring such similarities
(Donovan & Vlais, 2006). Campaigns should involve the affected group as a visible part of
the campaign, engage media personnel to change media representations, use advocacy and
activism to generate wider support and impact policy, provide opportunities for discussion
and interaction across groups and aim to pre-emptively address counterarguments (Donovan
& Vlais, 2006). Finally, lab experiments suggest that nonverbal behaviours (in audio-visual
representations) carry strong impact and need to be considered (Castelli et al., 2012), and
that messages’ content should be explicated (Vittrup & Holden, 2011).

Organisational development
Organisational development has been the least reviewed of the approaches we discuss here. Its
projects typically use development and change processes to assess or ‘audit’ organisational func­
tions in order to address discrimination and endorse diversity (Paradies et al., 2009, p. 52).

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Such projects may implement new organisational policies, plans or operational processes,
model and enforce non-discriminatory standards, and work to impact social norms and wider
societal change. They may use the three aforementioned approaches, as well as develop
resources (e.g. teacher professional development, journalist guides), draw on organisational
leadership and deploy conflict resolution approaches (Paradies et al., 2009, pp. 52–53).
Multiple studies have documented the effects of individual initiatives, suggesting promising
results in relation to organisations in areas such as healthcare (Weech-Maldonado et al., 2018),
education (Hagopian et al., 2018) and workplaces (Ferdinand, Paradies, & Kelaher, 2017;
Trenerry, Franklin, & Paradies, 2012).
Practices considered effective include development of a shared organisational vision, clear
goals, measurable outcomes, and organisational accountability, as well as customisation based
on local social, political and other contexts (Paradies et al., 2009; Trenerry, Franklin, &
Paradies, 2012). Initiatives are more impactful when cultivating transparency, trust and the
exchange of information (Ferdinand, Paradies, & Kelaher, 2017; Paradies et al., 2009).
Organisational development tends to involve multiple layers and elements and large-scale
public institutions. Although such complexity is important, it may also introduce inherent
challenges to organisational development that must be engaged with (Ferdinand, Paradies, &
Kelaher, 2017; Spaaij et al., 2016). Using a ‘whole of organisation’ approach (Trenerry,
Franklin, & Paradies, 2012), and a detailed strategic plan addressing multiple aspects
of organisational functioning are also considered effective practices (Trenerry, Franklin, &
Paradies, 2012, and see discussion in Abramovitz & Blitz, 2015).

Effective practice across approaches

Various practices have demonstrated effectiveness across two or more of the approaches we
discussed. At the outset, interventions should be carefully planned, mapped, and well devel­
oped, attending to areas like their objectives and materials, while involving a management
group and various stakeholders (Donovan & Vlais, 2006; Paradies et al., 2009). Interventions
that are theory-driven or based on solid theoretical foundations have been considered more
effective in curbing prejudice (Aboud et al., 2012; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006). The signifi­
cant place of evaluation research throughout interventions’ lifespan has been reiterated across
approaches, involving the use of formative research, preliminary testing of objectives and
methods (Aboud et al., 2012; Donovan and Vlais, 2006), allocation of sufficient resources for
planning and implementation (Paradies et al., 2009; Rankine, 2014), and preferably using
evaluations that consist of pre- and post- testing, randomisation, and delayed outcome meas­
ures (Paradies et al., 2009; Pedersen et al., 2011).
Strong support from organisational leaders and champions has been considered crucial for
programme effectiveness (Paradies et al., 2009; Trenerry, Franklin, & Paradies, 2012). There is
usually an advantage to longer programmes and to programmes that consist of many sessions
(Aboud et al., 2012; Kalinoski et al., 2013; Paradies et al., 2009; Pedersen et al., 2011), and wide
support for programmes that emphasise invoking empathy (Dovidio et al., 2017; Mazziotta
et al., 2011; Paluck & Green, 2009; Pedersen et al., 2011). Last, some have recommended that
these approaches work best when integrated and that initiatives are more impactful when
collaborating with other organisations involved in anti-racism work (Bezrukova, Jehn, & Spell,
2012; Paradies et al., 2009). The use of multiple, multi-level (e.g. state authorities, organisations),
reinforcing approaches, can render interventions more effective (Paradies et al., 2009; and see;
Ferdinand, Paradies, & Kelaher, 2017; Johnson, Antle, & Barbee, 2009; Weech-Maldonado
et al., 2018 for effective combinations of organisational development and training).

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Within the scope of this chapter, we are unable to discuss in detail real-world examples
of practices that embody many of these recommended approaches previously. For further
reading, refer to exemplary work on intergroup dialogue (Rodríguez et al., 2018); training
(Johnson, Antle, & Barbee, 2009); organisational development (Weech-Maldonado et al.,
2018); and media campaigns (Paluck, 2009, 2010).

Backlash effects
Anti-racism practice can have unintended consequences that may deter its effectiveness. The
possibility of such backlash should be considered and pre-empted. Backlash towards anti-
racism programmes, policies or practices, denotes forms of resistance that have the potential
to strengthen prejudiced attitudes and negative relations between in-groups and out-groups.
It can occur everywhere, from small-scale training to national populations, in relation, for
example, to multicultural policies (Hewitt, 2005). Backlash works in ways that range from
affective-based measures such as negative emotions, through to cognitive forms such as atti­
tudes and perceptions, and is expressed in behaviours that negatively affect the outcomes of
programmes, policies or practices (Kidder et al., 2004, p. 77). Anticipating backlash can itself
become a form of backlash, by precluding the initiation or implementation of anti-racism
initiatives, which can manifest as a refusal or withdrawal of basic resources and services
(Bakan and Kobayashi, 2004, 2007a, 2007b).
Research on perspective taking demonstrates that imagining one’s ‘self’ increases the
potential to negatively evaluate oneself which can entrench racial prejudice (Vorauer &
Sasaki, 2014). Perceived threat to notions of ‘self’ in interpersonal contexts (e.g. because of
high dissimilarity with others) may also provoke backlash effects (Sassenrath, Hodges, & Pfat­
theicher, 2016). Backlash is always a risk in intergroup encounters that confront negative
behaviours (Focella, Bean, & Stone, 2015). Some studies have explored how intergroup
encounters, where minority groups seek to reduce harm and prejudice by confronting per­
petrators, can produce backlash effects that increase prejudiced attitudes (Vorauer & Sasaki,
2009). Studies on confronting prejudice report various forms of backlash, including dislike
for the person and their perceived in-group (Czopp, Monteith, & Mark, 2006), while racial
discrimination reported by African American participants in educational settings resulted in
the stigmatisation of them as complainers (Kaiser & Miller, 2001). Other studies found that
out-group members who confronted discriminatory behaviour were more likely to be nega­
tively assessed (or have negative attitudes of them reinforced) by in-group members who
were being discriminatory (Gulker, Mark, & Monteith, 2013; Rasinski & Czopp, 2010).
This is especially true when persons who hold strong views of meritocracy are confronted,
where evaluations of the ‘confronter’ are particularly negative (Schultz & Maddox, 2013),
and likewise for those who adopt a colour-blind perspective (Zou & Dickter, 2013).
Forms of framing in anti-racist interventions play a significant role in manifestations of back­
lash. Framing diversity as ‘good’ within organisations (and not as ‘fair’) may broaden definitions
of diversity to include axes of difference beyond race, which can lead, unintentionally, to
deprioritising hiring applicants from racial minority backgrounds (Trawalter, Driskell, & David­
son, 2016). The colour-blind approach may often be seen as remedy to such paradoxical fram­
ings, although it can reinforce exclusive institutions that maintain unequal power structures in
society (Smith & Mayorga-Gallo, 2017). In institutions where cultural diversity is widespread,
multicultural policies are generally likely to reduce stereotyping and prejudice, whereas colour­
blind practices and policies (ignoring or avoiding race and racial categories) may enhance stereo­
typing and prejudice, and may leave discrimination undetected (Plaut, 2014). Also, while a focus

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on multiculturalist frameworks produces a higher rate of success in reducing biases than colour­
blind frameworks, negative outcomes routinely occur, and multiculturalist frameworks can
ironically produce higher instances of racialised essentialism, reproducing beliefs that race is bio­
logically determined and fixed (Wilton, Apfelbaum, & Good, 2019).
When diversity inclusion frameworks are imposed upon – or topped-down from
within – organisations, research has also found paradoxical outcomes. Dobbin, Schrage, and
Kalev (2015) examined the effects of workplace innovations like training, on managerial
diversity in 816 U.S. workplaces over 30 years. Accountability in the implementation of
such innovations, such as monitoring the impact of hiring reforms through ‘diversity man­
agers’, improved outcomes and reduced the potential for workplace backlash. However,
compulsory accountability frameworks often backfired, suggesting that frameworks should in
such contexts be willingly implemented. Using data on approximately 500 high-profile
employment discrimination lawsuits resolved in U.S. federal courts between 1996 and 2008,
Hirsh and Cha (2017) found that court-mandated policy changes to reduce bias expanded
opportunities for white women but not for other demographic groups, while policies to
increase awareness of rights were associated with declines in managerial diversity. Verdicts
with the most costly monetary payouts did not expand managerial diversity compared to
more modest payouts, and can further a lack of diversity.
Rutchick and Eccleston (2010) show that when minority groups invoke shared identity
characteristics with the majority group during diversity training, this may lead to negative
outcomes. The level of backlash exhibited in these experimental studies is predominantly
determined by the strength of relationship and identification that groups have with
a (perceived) larger homogenous whole, like the nation. The extent to which groups identify
as being emblematic of such an overarching whole determines the degree to which messages
that invoke dominant-group diversity will be received as intended (Falomir-Pichastor &
Frederic, 2013; Steffens et al., 2017).

Discussion
Assessments of intergroup contact, training and education, communications and media cam­
paigns and organisational development have varied in their approaches and conclusions.
Intergroup contact interventions have been frequently evaluated, resulting in a broad evi­
dence base that suggests that contact can often reduce racism, especially prejudice. Training
and education initiatives, and particularly cultural diversity/competence programmes, have
been widespread, yet not much is known about the extent to which, and circumstances
under which, they effectively address racism. Concerns about null and adverse effects have
made diversity training a particularly contentious area, as suggested by several study titles,
like ‘Why diversity programs fail’ (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016) and ‘Pointless diversity training’
(Noon, 2018). Other areas of anti-racism practice have seen far less evaluation. Communica­
tions and media campaigns show promise but also mixed findings, and have been scarcely
evaluated outside the lab. Organisational development initiatives have been discussed indi­
vidually (or as part of education/training initiatives), but to our knowledge have yet to be
collectively reviewed or assessed regarding their effects.
Anti-racism’s limited evidence base calls for further comprehensive, fine-grained analysis.
Field experiments are clearly a priority in this field because of the dynamic, real-life nature of
many anti-racism initiatives and the change they seek to instigate. In addition to using random­
isation and control, there remains a strong need for assessments to go beyond pre- and immediate
post- test measures. Given that intervention effects may transform post-intervention (for example

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diminish, or show delayed improvement) it is crucial that we develop better understanding of

what happens long after initiatives end. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the relationship
between training, communications and organisational development initiatives (and initiative
components) and the reduction of racial prejudice, discrimination, and contingent outcomes per­
taining to racism are also much-needed.
Recently, several studies have emerged that constitute promising future directions in anti-
racism practice and research. Examples of innovative, effective methodologies include read­
ing popular books (e.g. Harry Potter) to reduce prejudice that capitalise on processes like
identification and perspective taking (Vezzali et al., 2015), embodiment of another racial/
ethnic group’s (e.g. black) virtual body to reduce implicit racial bias (Banakou, Hanumanthu,
& Slater, 2016; Peck et al., 2013), and exposure to extreme racist audio-visual content
which can, paradoxically, lead individuals to reassess their current (less extreme) racist atti­
tudes and beliefs (Hameiri, Bar-Tal, & Halperin, 2019; Hameiri et al., 2014, 2016).
Based on available research, anti-racism initiatives are particularly effective when they are
carefully developed, theory- and evidence- based, longer-term, draw on clear objectives and
explicit messages, and include rigorous, ongoing evaluation research (e.g. Johnson, Antle, &
Barbee, 2009; Paluck, 2009, 2010; Rodríguez et al., 2018; Weech-Maldonado et al., 2018).
Reviews also repeatedly stress, and successful initiatives demonstrate, the significance of collab­
oration, support from and ongoing engagement with and between stakeholders, from institu­
tional leadership to affected groups. There are indications that the integration of various
approaches, initiative components, methods and materials is effective in addressing racism.
Emerging scholarship cautions us against ways in which anti-racism initiatives may do more
harm than good and have led to efforts to understand how we can best avoid backlash. Key
suggestions include avoiding negations, given that injunctions to ‘do not’ create unintended
associations between subjects (Gawronski et al., 2008), enhancing participants’ self-affirmation
(Stone et al., 2011; Watt et al., 2009), and being wary of framing diversity within an overrid­
ing identity category (e.g. ‘the nation’) that the dominant in-group is protective of (Falomir-
Pichastor & Frederic, 2013; Steffens et al., 2017).

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 17
Anti-racism and everyday life
Kristine Aquino

Introduction
Despite the fact that much of ‘the history of anti-racism consists of the actions of ordinary
people’, studies on ‘everyday anti-racism’ remain little consolidated in racism and anti-racism
theory (Bonnett, 2000: 88). Following from Essed’s (1991) seminal work on the concept of
‘everyday racism’, the term ‘everyday anti-racism’ has been employed across varied studies to
refer to the ways in which individuals respond to racism in interpersonal interactions and
spaces of encounter in their day-to-day lives (Bonnett, 2000; Lamont and Fleming, 2005;
Pollock, 2008; Mitchell et al.,2011; Nelson, 2015a; Aquino, 2017). This can include the
actions of victims confronting perpetrators, witnesses speaking out against racism, practices
that bridge cultural difference, material and subjective strategies deployed by those on the
receiving end of racism to repair stigmatized identities, and aestheticized expressions through
popular culture such as forms of music, youth cultures and media that challenge racism. In
this chapter, I review selected works examining anti-racism in everyday life and draw out its
key tenets as an area of study with the aim of highlighting how it contributes to broader
anti-racism theory and praxis.
The chapter begins with a brief background discussion on how anti-racism debates are
bound to older and larger deliberations around the concepts of race and racism which have
been characterized by divergences in terms and concepts and dichotomies between the struc­
tural/ideological, macro/micro, economic/cultural, leading to calls to better connect theory
with lived experience. I then summarize key areas that make up everyday anti-racism litera­
ture: the ‘micro’ dimensions of historical social movements and epochs; ‘doing’ anti-racism
in organizational/institutional contexts; negotiating cultural difference and countering racism
in spaces of ‘encounter’; and victims developing ‘cultural repertoires’ to cope with racism.
By no means an exhaustive literature review, this chapter instead highlights some of the cen­
tral objectives of research on everyday anti-racism which involve enhancing understandings
of how ‘the everyday’ is an integral part of the processes that configure and challenge racism.
In these works, everyday life is not just seen as the ‘setting’ where racism and anti-racism
happen but applied as a conceptual tool that can problematize taken-for-granted understand­
ings of how race, racism and resistance operate – understandings that have traditionally been
predominated by a macro-sociology bias. According to Essed (2001: 188), the everyday does
not simply refer to one’s immediate sphere, but rather, the intersection between micro and
macro spheres – the complex of contexts, processes and practices ‘present in and activated at

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the everyday level as well as pre-structured in a way that transcends the control of individual
subjects’. In this way, the everyday can involve multifaceted and contradictory processes of
reproducing and contesting racism at both the structural and interactional, behavioral and
ideological, macro and micro levels. As Essed (1991: 8) argues, ‘such analysis demands an
eye for detail and challenge the researcher to organize and understand an enormous number
of divergent experiences’ which has by convention deterred deep scholarly engagement. In
reviewing studies of everyday anti-racism, this chapter shows how the ‘unruly quality of
everyday experience’ (Smith, 2014: 1139) in particular can serve a significant function in
racism studies, via the ways in which it can ‘shake our confidence in the seemingly clear-cut
intellectual categories and stories by which we go about making sense of things’. Engaging
with the everyday can have a ‘monitory effect’ (Smith, 2014: 1140) on how analysis is
organized in the field – reminding researchers to check tendencies that fix concepts, categor­
ies and approaches which may be at odds with the instability of quotidian experience and
this attentiveness can help enable racism theory and anti-racism praxis to remain socially and
politically engaged.

Race, racism and anti-racism theory: fractures and divisions

At the simplest level, anti-racism can be defined as ‘forms of thought and/or practice that
seek to confront, eradicate and/or ameliorate racism’ and as ‘ideologies and practices that
affirm and seek to enable the equality of races and ethnic groups’ (Bonnett, 2000: 4). The
straightforwardness, however, ends there as it remains contested how it is we actually reach
this goal. What it means to be ‘equal’ is fraught with complexity – should we uphold ideals
of universalism or particularism as the basis of equality? Do we really mean to address
inequality or inequity? And how can we most productively deal with racism – do we focus
change on institutions or individuals, systems or interactions, or practices and thinking?
Dualistic logic has tended to underline the predominant ways in which anti-racism has been
discussed which is bound to the prevalent ways in which the related terms of race and
racism have also been debated and theorized. Over the three decades between the 1980s and
2000s, in the English-speaking academy, dichotomous conceptual and methodological
approaches came to define race, racism and anti-racism as either cultural or economic con­
cerns, structural or ideological processes, macro or micro phenomena. The fractures, accord­
ing to some scholars, risked ‘over-theorizing’ of the field and, moreover, disconnection from
social and political engagement (Knowles, 2010). In this section, I outline briefly some of
the central issues underpinning these dialogues to set the scene as to how the study of every­
day anti-racism has contributed some grounded insights to these debates. The field of study
is sizable and I wish to note that I am only able to mention some of the voices in the
debate. I also flag that while the conditions of racism and anti-racism are specific to place
they also connect across contexts and so the discussion here specifies certain national circum­
stances but often crosses borders.
As an important starting point Lentin (2000; 2008) reminds us that grappling with the
expansive discussion begins with the contested concept of race. In the early twentieth cen­
tury, the invalidation by science of the biological certainty of racial difference and the chal­
lenges posed to racial regimes by social movements made up of long-oppressed racial
minorities, threw up questions around the ideological basis of racism and the nature of racist
practice, with some scholars calling for the abandonment of the term and concept of race.
Gilroy (2002: 253) for example famously called for ‘the end to raciology’, arguing that the
continued theoretical engagement with the discredited concept of race reified essentialisms

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particularly in the construction of racial or ethnic ‘camps’ who in their anti-racism politics
took up pre-defined positions around ‘the Black subject’, ‘the Asian subject’ and so on.
Miles (1989) similarly argued against race’s persistent autonomy as an analytical category but
instead stressed that it was operating to obscure the economic relations that produce racism.
The work of other scholars like Taylor (1994), meanwhile, saw a turn to questions around
‘ethnicity’, ‘multiculturalism’ and a ‘politics of recognition’, exemplifying the culturalist dis­
course that came to ultimately supplant the discourse of race, wherein, ‘culture’ (customs,
ways of life, traditions and so on) was taken up as the more apt marker of difference and
posited as departing from the violence of old racial categories.
This ‘cultural turn’ became integral to giving voice to the experience of those most
silenced by racism. For example, feminist accounts by hooks (1992) and Collins (2004) in
the US on the experience of black women shed light on the different positionalities of the
racialized subject to render understandings of racism more complex, in that, race can be gen­
dered and gender can be racialized. Hall (1992) in his work on ‘new ethnicities’ in the UK,
meanwhile, challenged understandings of migrant identities and positionalities as static and
coherent through notions like hybridity and multiplicity which revealed processes of agency
and flexibility to rework the fixedness in conceptions of diaspora and nation. Despite being
taken up with enthusiasm, however, some scholars were skeptical that discourses of culture
were eradicating essentialist ideas of group differences. Balibar (1991) and Taguieff (1990),
for instance, writing from the French context, argued that domination was being newly
articulated through a ‘differentialist racism’ and warned that anti-racism projects based on
celebrating cultural pluralism would abet the perpetuation of a racism rationalized around
the insurmountability of cultural differences. Those writing on Indigenous struggles, for
instance in Australia, also pointed out that the focus on questions of culture and ethnicity
was very problematic for Indigenous groups who particularly rely on mobilizing the history
of race to distinguish their plight as separate from ‘ethnic minorities’ or ‘migrant groups’
(Cowlish and Morris, 1997).
Furthermore, structuralists remained persistent in arguing that concerns should be cen­
tered on social systems and not in ideological discussions of culture and identity nor
questions related to recognition. In part this stemmed from long-held opposition to psy­
chological definitions of racism, wherein, works by Bonilla-Silva (1997) and Goldberg
(2002) in the US on racism’s systematic nature disputed early understandings that patho­
logized racism as an individual problem or a mere issue of cultural stereotypes and
beliefs. Rather, the structural approach emphasized how histories of colonization and
empire, institutions such as the state, and systems like capitalism, were the real sources of
racism that needed to be challenged. A particular strand of theorization espoused by
scholars like Miles (1987) in the UK, Wilson (1978) in the US, and Morrisey (1984) in
Australia, specified that class relations and modes of production determined the limited
power held by minority racial groups and positioned racism as the denial of access to
resources. Against the latter, cultural studies scholars insisted on the non-reductiveness to
race, ethnicity and culture but, as the cultural field became preoccupied with symbols
and representation, were continually dismissed for making little progress against ending
the material inequalities produced by racism (St Louis, 2002). There was, moreover,
a prevailing ‘macro-sociological bias’ in racism studies according to Essed (1991: 101),
that generally paid little serious attention to ‘micro-interactional perspectives on racism’
nor ‘the phenomenological dimensions of racism’, denoting a general indifference
towards the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘underrating of the insights of “laypersons”’ in racism
studies.

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These debates, Lentin (2000: 101) argues, were not merely semantic, but signal the pro­
found difficulties in finding a language to analyse and understand racism ‘without tried and
tested concepts’ that give meaning to the struggle for anti-racism. Evidenced in the earlier
discussion in this chapter, initial analysis of anti-racism chiefly focused on the actions of gov­
ernments, politicians, international human rights institutions and social movements which
took form in public policy, anti-discrimination legislation, affirmative action, and political
platforms. At this level, anti-racism has been crucial to addressing broader structures of
power – focusing on the re-education of society by targeting institutions of socialization like
schools and the media but also attempting to transform the economy, law enforcement, and
allocation of resources and services. Yet, at times, under the control of institutions, anti-
racism has also proven to be about ‘the reproduction of modern economies and the estab­
lishment of internationally accepted principles of political legitimacy’ (Bonnett, 2000: 26).
The politicized interests that governments, institutions, and anti-racism groups have had in
anti-racism thus made many initially critical of formal policies, legislation and programs
which showed themselves as being pursued in the self-interest of political ideologies and eco­
nomic outcomes (Gilroy, 2002).
A binary opposition of emphasizing sameness or difference as the basis of ‘equality’ also
surfaced in anti-racism perspectives, simultaneously advancing much needed theoretical
engagement with the notion of anti-racism but also began to undermine anti-racist action
(Wieviorka, 1997). Equality defined by sameness is rooted in values of universalism and is,
for example, embodied in ‘color-blind’ and ‘post-racial’ policies in the US which entails
positioning ‘racial difference’ as irrelevant if everyone is to be treated as ‘the same’. Equality
defined through difference, on the other hand, encourages acknowledging the particularities
and pluralities of ethno-racial groups and manifest in policies of multiculturalism in states
like Canada and Australia which advocate for ‘unity in diversity’. The former was criticized
by scholars like Goldberg (2002) and Bonilla-Silva (2017) for invalidating struggles against
racism especially masking how racial ideologies continue to permeate social systems. The
acknowledgment of difference, meanwhile, produced populist backlash over affirmative
action or diversity policies for giving ‘preferential’ treatment to minorities which Essed
(1991) and Beneton (2001), among others, argued demonstrated the failures of cultural plur­
alism as anti-racism policy in sufficiently addressing the conduct, practice, and ideologies of
racism. That pluralism was bearing little fruit in the fight against racism was never enough to
give way to embracing universalism. Lentin (2004: 98), for example, argued that more dam­
aging are the enduring universalist ideals of sameness once manifested in colonialism and
which persist in assimilationist and integration policies.
Such debates are essential in exploring and exposing the complex contours of racism and
its consequences. As Hall (2002: 41) has argued, while theoretical and ideological divisions
are often seen as being opposed to each other ‘they can also be understood, in many
respects, as inverted mirror images of one another. Each tries to supplement the weakness of
the opposing paradigm by stressing the so-called “neglected” element’ (Hall, 2002: 38).
Nonetheless, disputes around theory and approaches, can fall prey to disconnecting from the
ordinary lives victimized by racism and their lived struggles fighting racism (Back and Solo-
mos, 2002). Over the last decade or so in racism studies, renewed engagement with ‘the
everyday’ – as a site of empirical investigation, as a concept to inform methodology, as
a base from which to build theory – has allayed this risk to add further texture to the field.
Essed’s theory of ‘everyday racism’ for example, while articulated in the past through
concepts such as ‘infra-racism’ (Wieviorka, 1995) or ‘interactional racism’ (Brandt, 1986), has
now been widely adopted as conceptual framework and methodological approach to

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examine routinized racism in schools, workplaces and public spaces across a range of inter­
national contexts. It has stressed the mutual interdependence of macro and micro spheres
through analysis of the intersection between social systems and human conduct, illuminating
how ‘structures of racism do not exist external to agents – they are made by agents – but
specific practices are by definition racist only when they activate existing structural racial
inequalities in the system’ (Essed, 1991: 39). Work by Knowles (2003) on the concept of
‘everyday race-making’ is a similar mode of social analysis that advocates to close ‘the gap
between hyper-theorized conceptions of race and the social practices that operate around
them’ (Knowles, 2010: 26). Using a materialist approach to address the quandary of race as
both mythical and real, she engages with ‘social texture’ by interrogating how the intersec­
tion of bodies, space and subjectivities produce or contest racialized privilege and
disadvantage.
Understandings of anti-racism too have also been subject to an engagement with the
everyday although little consolidated. In the section to follow I identify literature that
explore the notion of everyday anti-racism and point out the ways in which these works
bridge some theoretical and empirical gaps and disputes in larger debates.

Everyday anti-racism: key themes in the literature

Micro dimensions of historical social movements and epochs

Though not originally conceived within the discourse of ‘everyday anti-racism’, historical
accounts of resisting racism in everyday life have been long documented via the activities of
actors or groups directly participating in social movements against racial inequality or, more
indirectly, accounting for the tactics of ‘everyday resistance’ deployed by ordinary people
against racial systems set within historical epochs.
The literature on anti-colonial or anti-slavery movements contains some of these stor­
ies. For example, Vieira (1995) and Andrew’s (1994) writings on resistance from African
slaves in colonial Brazil focus on how the abolition of slavery was enhanced through the
actions of slaves who escaped from plantations to form self-sufficient communities called
quilombos, setting up secret societies that enabled the preservation of some African cultural
practices in modern Brazil. Moyd (2017) has also described ‘everyday colonialism’ in
Africa and the tactics used to challenge colonial demands in the continent such as Afri­
cans employing avoidance methods to escape wartime service or refusing to be recruited
for jobs in public works to disrupt economic growth, which set the foundations for
organized trade unions in the future. In the US, the work of Aptheker (1992) reports on
the period from the eighteenth century to the emancipation of African American slaves,
showing how rebellion was in part driven by multiracial coalitions between blacks and
whites including arming themselves against slave owners or securing hideouts for escaped
African Americans and set precedence to the establishment of multiracial groups like the
NAACP (see O’Brien, 2009). Lawson (1991: 457) details scholarship on the civil rights
movement between the 1970s and 1980s which shifted focus away from ‘leaders’ of the
movement to grass-roots efforts which shed light on the experience of ordinary people
involved. She describes literature by Chafe, Morris, and Killian which looked at the
experience of student sit-ins and how these actors were shaped by protest cultures culti­
vated by churches, civic groups and colleges. Notably, literature in this area has also high­
lighted intersectionality by documenting the experience of non-white women involved in
historical action (Keisha-Khan, 2004; Springer, 2005; Chun et al., 2013). The interest in

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the ordinary people involved in larger movements are carried through in more recent
writings on grass-roots resistance in contemporary racialized urban contexts, for example,
in the fight against police racism and the struggle for land rights.
Related scholarship examining what Scott (1990) calls the ‘infra-politics’ of those unattached
to organizations or political movements is also significant to the historical documentation of anti-
racism in everyday life. Scott (1990) defines infra-politics as composed of ‘hidden transcripts’ of
the oppressed which mock, criticize and subvert their oppressors. There is much work here on
the everyday and popular culture practices of African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, such as historical research by Levine (1978) on the jokes, folklore songs and stories
used by African Americans to mock white authority, or Kelley’s (1994) exposition of black
working-class resistance such as foot-dragging on the factory floor, theft from the workplace,
and secret practices of ‘black-listing’ abusive employers among black women working in domes­
tic households. Again, the struggle against colonial domination by the colonized also provides
similar stories, for example, Santiago Jr. (2015) has explored how incidents of ‘bad manners’ such
as rudeness, deceitfulness, clumsiness, and insolence among native Filipinos in colonial Philip­
pines were acts of defiance against colonial authority. España-Maram (2006) meanwhile historic­
ally accounts for how the zoot-suits worn by Filipino workers in Los Angeles during World War
Two in low-brow taxi dance halls enabled a departure from their status as ‘servants’. These his­
tories of cultural production ‘communicate the expressive and socially challenging content of
everyday anti-racism’ (Bonnett, 2000: 91) and form the roots of contemporary ‘anti-racist popu­
lar culture’ (Bonnett, 2000: 92) expressed for example in subversive forms of music, leisure prac­
tices, and youth fashions today.
The focus on ordinary people in these accounts has widened perspectives that social
movements are mostly played out at the legislative or policy stage or that historical change is
only orchestrated by national leaders, but rather, that they have equally been driven by strug­
gles engaged by individuals and within communities. This ‘history from below’ (Scott, 1990)
which is the history of ordinary people, and its intersecting focus on ‘everyday resistance’ in
the tradition of scholars like cultural theorist de Certeau or anthropologist Abu-Lughod, are
not merely documented to celebrate ‘heroic acts’ in everyday life but also aim to shed light
on how daily actions and practices can amass effect on relations of power both at the micro
and macro levels. As well, the fight against racism is proven to be as much about the struggle
for recognition and creating new identities for the oppressed as it is about creating structural
change and how the latter may not be possible if not fueled by the former.

‘Doing’ anti-racism in organizational/institutional contexts

Complementing the large body of studies on the anti-racism initiatives and policies of organiza­
tions or institutions in societies in the North, is research that explores the experience of people
grappling with the challenges of implementing initiatives ‘on the ground’ within these settings.
By far, the topic of practicing anti-racism in the educational sector forms a large part of
the research in this area (Epstein, 1993; Kailin, 2002; Zembylas, 2012). The work of Pollock
(2006, 2008, 2017) in particular is associated with furthering the term ‘everyday anti-racism’
via her edited collection Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School. The book
consists of contributions from researchers, many of whom were former teachers, reflecting
on the messiness of practicing anti-racism in the American classroom around top-down dir­
ectives such as ‘color-blindness’ or ‘race consciousness’. The research explores ‘everyday acts’
inside the classroom that can perpetuate racial inequality including how teachers talk to and
discipline students, the ways in which communities are framed and discussed in curriculum,

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how papers are graded, how teachers interact with parents, and the manner in which student
aspirations are framed. Through these examples Pollock (2008) advances theoretically the
concept of ‘the everyday’ in the term ‘everyday anti-racism’ by encouraging reflection in
routine, taken-for-granted moments of the schooling experience. The collection hopes to
function as a practical resource and puts forward four paradoxical points of reflection to
facilitate a critical everyday anti-racism in the classroom: rejecting false notions of human
difference; acknowledging and engaging in lived experiences along racial lines; building
upon and celebrating the differences that racialized groups positively value about themselves;
and equipping self and others to challenge racial inequality. These contradictory points aim
to inspire routinely contemplating what moves to make and when, in terms of anti-racist
practice.
The ‘hands-on’ challenges and successes of doing anti-racism are also documented in
other organizational/institutional contexts such as healthcare and social welfare sectors
(Cortis and Law, 2005; Durey, 2010; Pon et al., 2011), corporations (Wrench, 2005), and
sporting clubs, bodies and programs (Woodward, 2007; Flintoff et al., 2015). Findings
have, in particular, engaged with the status of whiteness of people undertaking the work of
anti-racism and the implications around power and disadvantage within these organiza­
tional settings. Interestingly, recent focus has also been placed on individuals working in
state or local government agencies, NGOs and community organizations who deal directly
with ethnic groups, inter-ethnic relations and racism. For example, research by Nelson and
Dunn (2017) in Australia discuss the ways in which employees are cognisant of the limita­
tions of ‘celebratory’ initiatives such as multicultural festivals and ‘Harmony Day’ in
addressing structural racisms but nonetheless deliver them, blaming pressures of a neo­
liberal agenda infiltrating the sector which has de-politicized racism and anti-racism.
Nelson (2015b) elaborates by describing the difficulties in ‘speaking’ racism and anti-racism
among these workers which can be attributed to things like the government’s hesitancy to
use the term ‘racism’ and thus look unfavorably on program funding applications that use
this word. Yet, despite actors being constrained by larger institutional pressures or that
they must endorse initiatives that often fail to address deep-seated issues, there are still
benefits to everyday anti-racism in these spaces. For example, because of the micro con­
text, the successes and failures of the anti-racism can be ‘locally owned’ which still offers
up possibilities to change norms (Nelson and Dunn, 2017).
These studies challenge the institutional/individual binary by reminding us that institu­
tions comprise people and are not independent of them, and that structural racisms are per­
petuated or challenged via human action. Moreover, they shed insight into the ambiguities
of ‘applying’ or ‘doing’ the anti-racism policies of organizations and institutions, accentuating
everyday anti-racism as a praxis that is ‘complex, conflict ridden and deeply consequential’
(Pollock, 2006: 4). Such research has also emphasized the importance of individuals reflecting
on one’s positioning in terms of race, particularly white privilege, when occupying levels of
institutional influence such as the position of a teacher, policy-maker, program coordinator,
manager, coach and so on, but also simultaneously signals the risks in research focusing on
a white-centric anti-racism.

Negotiating cultural difference and countering racism in spaces of

‘encounter’
While not explicitly framed as everyday anti-racism, over the last two decades, a prominent
area of literature has looked at the bridging of cultural and racio-ethnic differences in spaces

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of ‘encounter’. Approaches from geography and sociology, particularly from scholarly work
in the UK and Australia, predominate in this literature and often focus on routine interper­
sonal encounters with difference in public or quasi-public spaces, with a growing interest in
the private intimate sphere.
The most significant strand of this research looks at how collective civic cultures are forged in
shared public spaces. Research on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Wise and Velayutham, 2009),
‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ (Noble, 2009), ‘rubbing along’ (Watson, 2009) and ‘micro-publics’
(Amin, 2008), have shed light on how cultural and racio-ethnic difference is negotiated in
a range of spaces people traverse and inhabit such as neighborhood parks and streets, schools,
workplaces, shopping centers, cafes, public transport, and leisure and sporting spaces. Perhaps the
most taken up in empirical study has been investigation into modes of ‘everyday multicultural­
ism’, which Wise and Velayutham (2009: 3) define as a theory that pivots from ideological and
policy-based definitions of multiculturalism to instead explaining how multiculturalism is ‘lived’.
Accordingly, it espouses a grounded approach to studying multicultural communities via ethno­
graphic and qualitative methods. Drawing on theorists such as Latour, Mauss, Massey, Bourdieu
and Lefebvre, subsequent studies pay attention to the assemblage of bodies, practice, affect,
matter and space that make possible the habits and dispositions for inclusive cohabitation but also
those that produce racisms and intercultural conflict. For example, in examining suburban multi­
culturalism in Sydney, Wise (2005, 2011, 2013) fleshes out the sensory aspects of diversity
materialized in shopping streets, wherein, encounters with different bodies and smells of food
along with foreign signage can produce encounters of racism but also function as sites to connect
across differences. Watson (2017), commenting from superdiverse London, stresses how the
physical infrastructure and design of public space can encourage community cohesion and inter-
ethnic interaction to reduce negative affect, distrust, fear and antagonism that can feed racist sen­
timents. Asian cities now also form the basis of analysis, such as navigating ethnically diverse
workplaces in Singapore through the use of humor (Wise, 2016), or the use of linguistic
resources among diverse workers in restaurants in Tokyo to communicate across difference (Pen­
nycook and Otsuji, 2014).
Investigation into encounters in private spaces, meanwhile, is less ubiquitous but growing,
particularly through the work of Valentine who argues that interaction in public spaces are
likely prefigured by habits and dispositions ‘developed, enacted and contested within “pri­
vate” spaces of the homes of family and friends’ (Valentine and Sadgrove, 2012: 2,051) and
so it is pertinent to understand the connection between the two spheres. In looking at
family relationships in the UK and European contexts, Valentine et al. (2015) found that
diversity experienced within the family through, for instance, the presence of inter-racial
relationships, can foster positive attitudes in public life towards the social group the family
member represents, but such attitudes are not enough to challenge wider prejudices towards
other groups. Nelson (2015a) has taken up the same concerns in her Australian research and
adopts Butler’s theory of performativity as a means to examining ‘whether social change
might be enacted through performance’ (Nelson, 2015a: 491). She suggests that looking at
performative racist talk and practice within families, a key site of socialization, can reveal
‘the repetitive and citational practices that both reproduce and potentially subvert discourse’
(Nelson, 2015a: 491–3).
The other strand of research that examines negotiating and countering racism in spaces of
encounter are emergent studies on ‘bystander anti-racism’. The work of Australian scholars
makes up recent research on this topic which takes some inspiration from social psychology
to define bystander anti-racism as actions taken by people not directly involved or targeted
by racism who speak out against or engage others to respond to interpersonal or systemic

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racism. Nelson et al., (2011), for example, argue for recognizing the potentials of bystander
anti-racism in taking some of the burden of combating racism away from the target, decreas­
ing public expressions of racism if more witnesses speak out against racism, potentially edu­
cating and changing perpetrators’ behaviors when racism is called out, and feelings of
personal satisfaction for the bystander for challenging racism. There are though obstacles that
can hinder speaking up against racism which they identify as fears of perpetrators turning on
the bystander, evaluations of the event as not being ‘serious’ enough to intervene, or the
perceived idea that intervention would be ineffective (Stewart et al., 2014; also see Pedersen
et al., 2011).
These literatures on encounter have come a long way from Allport’s original conception
of the ‘contact hypothesis’ by illustrating the complexities of engaging with difference in
everyday life. Scholarship on everyday multiculturalism has illuminated the textures of modes
of inclusion and exclusion in lived experiences and the everyday methods and means
through which we learn how to live together across difference. However, critiques are wary
of spatial and temporal assumptions that fleeting encounters in public space necessarily alter
deep-seated attitudes around racial and ethnic difference and thus the connection between
public/private domains is worthy of more attention (Valentine, 2008). This speaks to the
general challenge of how it is successful micro-encounters can be ‘scaled-up’ into successful
policy to bring about larger social change (Onyx et al., 2011). Likewise, that the ‘bystander’
is often framed as a white actor cautions at the limitations of bystander anti-racism in shifting
wider arrangements of racialized power (Lentin, 2017).

‘Cultural repertoires’ of coping with racism

The final noteworthy area of work on everyday anti-racism comes from American sociolo­
gist Lamont, who has investigated the ‘cultural repertoires’ that inform the coping mechan­
isms deployed by individuals victimized by racism. Lamont’s collaborative empirical studies
have examined the experience of African American upper and working-class in the US
(Lamont and Askartova, 2002; Lamont and Fleming, 2005) and North African immigrants in
France (Lamont et al., 2002) and has recently expanded to international comparisons of
immigrant and minority responses to racism in the contexts of Israel, Brazil, Sweden and
Canada (Lamont and Mizrachi, 2012; Lamont et al., 2016).
Couched in Lamont’s long-term interest in using the tools of cultural sociology to under­
stand how ordinary individuals construct and/or bridge group boundaries across race and
class, Lamont and Fleming (2005: 31) conceive of everyday anti-racism as ‘micro level
responses that individuals use to counter racist ideology in their daily life’ and unpack the
‘cultural repertoires’ that inform these responses – the ‘tool-kits’ of material and non-
material devices, ‘the symbolic elements … the sets of ideas, stories, discourses, frames and
beliefs that people draw on to create a line of action’ (Hall and Lamont, 2013: 18). There is
a focus on Goffman-esque identity work and understanding the meaning-making processes
that go into countering stigmatization, repairing ‘spoiled identities’ and ‘managing the self’.
For example, Lamont and Fleming (2005) uncover how upper class African Americans draw
on their education, intelligence and competence as anti-racist devices to rebut negative racial
stereotypes. On the other hand, non-college educated African Americans see money and
consumption practices as providing avenues to respect and ‘equal footing’ with the dominant
group (Lamont, 2002). However, both groups draw on principles of the ‘universality of
human nature’ to understand that everyone, regardless of race and class, ultimately shares the
same status as ‘children of God’ with similar human needs. These findings particularly

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highlight the situated nature of anti-racism in everyday life, in this case, there is a contextual
way ordinary people operationalize values of universalism and particularism to conceive of
‘equality’ as opposed to seeing them as binary opposites.
Further multi-sited research by Lamont and collaborators expound comparative responses
to racism across different stigmatized groups in different national contexts. Research in Israel,
for example, indicates national markers of identity as central to the repertoires of marginal­
ized groups compared to the market-oriented repertoires of stigmatized African Americans in
the US. Findings from Mizrachi and Zawdu (2012) and Mizrachi and Herzog (2013) show
how Ethiopian Jews manage the injuries of phenotypical racism associated with blackness by
mobilizing the Zionist nationalist narrative to emphasize their ‘belonging’ to the nation,
Mizrachi Jews play up their Jewishness to negate the low status attached to their arrival from
other Arab countries, and Palestinian Arabs seek to maintain their dignity via the status of
the ‘ultimate other’ in the context of ongoing violence between Arabs and Jews in the
Middle East. Further away, in Sweden, Bursell (2012) illustrates how Middle Eastern
migrants subscribe to a discourse of assimilation by exchanging their foreign-sounding sur­
names for Swedish-sounding ones to enable them to ‘pass’ in mainstream society while still
remaining attached to their ethnic identity in their private lives. Outside of these collabor­
ations, other scholars have also taken up Lamont’s model of everyday anti-racism and, inter­
estingly, have focused on unearthing the experience of middle-class racial minorities. Lacy’s
(2007) ethnography with suburban middle-class blacks in the US unpacks the ‘tool-kits’
from which this group draw to navigate their raced and classed positionalities which largely
involve conflicted experiences with neo-liberalized choices around the suburbs in which
they live or the schools to which they send their children. This is echoed in my own work
on middle-class Filipino migrants in Sydney which reveal similar repertoires that feed strat­
egies of social mobility, consumption practices and discourses of middle-class respectability as
a means to repair stigmatized racial identities, but that also produce a status of in-
betweenness as inclusion remains conditional and revocable (Aquino, 2016). Furthermore,
middle-class individualism contrasts to the repertoires of working-class Filipino migrants who
tend to draw on notions of solidarity, rights and justice as a means to cope with racism,
including coping with the intra-ethnic othering they must endure from their more econom­
ically mobile counterparts (Aquino, 2017).
The idea of everyday anti-racism as being composed of ‘cultural repertoires’ helps reveal ‘the
active elements in the processes through which actors make sense of their ability to pursue cer­
tain lines of action’ (Hall and Lamont, 2013: 18). It can draw out the heterogeneity in societies
as different contexts make available (and attractive) distinct kinds of resources for resisting
racism. The interesting focus on the experience of racial minorities in the middle-class has also
complexified reductive structuralist arguments positing that social mobility and economic inte­
gration provide a buffer against racism. These actors are positioned in between inclusion/exclu­
sion, equality/inequality which anti-racism dichotomies can fail to take into account.
Moreover, anti-racism in these middle-class contexts reveal some problematic strategies to
combat racism – such as those based on assimilationist, neo-liberal, individualistic, privatized
values – which prompt necessary investigation into what kinds of inclusive membership need to
be fostered across different milieus (Lamont and Fleming, 2005).

Conclusion
In recently mapping out the old and new terrains of anti-racism, Paradies (2016: 2–3)
states that intellectual differences remain and ‘we still lack a shared notion of what is

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meant by anti-racism’ nor do we yet have a ‘well developed typology of anti-racist

theory and practice anywhere in the academic world’, although, ‘it is debatable whether
distinct types of anti-racism can be distinguished, or more importantly, what the value is
in doing so’. Paradies (2016: 2–3) therefore suggests instead for the ‘need to recognise
the concomitant plurality of anti-racisms’ as ‘mutual reinforcement across various anti­
racisms’ may perhaps be the most effective means of addressing racism. Everyday anti-
racism, the ways in which individuals respond to racism in their day-to-day lives, can at
times focus on resistance from the marginalized and points to the problematic way that
the onus to combat racism continues to be mostly taken up by those victimized by
racism. Investing in efforts to dismantle racism at the structural level through policy, legal
and systemic change that addresses unequal power relations thus remains crucial. This is
especially so in light of the resurgence of racisms in societies in the North that accentuate
the historically deep-seated problem of racism and its profoundly institutionalized and
transnational nature. However, everyday anti-racism is an important arena with which
broader anti-racism theory and politics can engage, as it describes the lived and messy
struggles against racism ‘on the ground’. Studies into everyday anti-racism reveal how
racism is not experienced by people as a monolithic system but rather lived out context­
ually, necessitating situated strategies to negotiate racism across different temporal and
spatial circumstances. It is a ‘people-centered’ study of racism and anti-racism but
attempts to make important links between everyday practice and larger structures and
institutions. It delves into questions of ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ that, while engaged with
symbols, representation and discourse, also attempts to reconnect with questions around
the redistribution of power. Furthermore, everyday anti-racism is an imperfect politics –
at times engaging problematic strategies to combat racism that do not always aim to
achieve ‘equality for all’ – but nevertheless importantly reveal the hard and complicated
labor of fighting racism which must be better taken into account in designing broader
anti-racism policy and action.

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 18
Formulating a theory in
anti-racism activism
Rashawn Ray and Genesis Fuentes

Formulating a theory in anti-racism activism

Canadian comedian and political commentator, Samantha Bee, did a special focusing on racial
euphemisms. She noted the lengths to which the media will go to not call a racist act as racism.
When racist events happen, the media will often label the incidents as “racially charged” or
“racially insensitive.” Bee pushed back against these euphemisms and instead suggested that
when racialized events happen the media should say, “The racist did racism which was racist.”
Bee’s segment raises an interesting quandary about how to properly tackle racism. This chapter
aims to provide some theoretical and practical ways to make engaging in anti-racist activism nor­
mative. Drawing upon critical race theory (CRT) and the public health critical race praxis
(PHCRP), we establish a racially-inclusive sociological imagination framework to better formu­
late a typology for addressing structural racism. We use policing in the United States as a case to
illuminate the pervasive ways that structural racism permeates a social institution such as the
criminal justice system.

The pervasiveness of structural racism: the case of policing

In 2015, Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed White supremacist, walked into an African American
church in South Carolina and murdered nine people. Apprehended days later as an armed and
dangerous fugitive of the law, police officers took Roof to eat at Burger King on his way to jail.
Many people wondered whether a non-White mass murderer would have been given this type of
preferential treatment. Accordingly, some noted the Burger King incident as a lack of respect for
Black bodies and a direct affront to racial progress. Furthermore, the presiding judge over Roof’s
initial hearing was removed due to information indicating that he may hold stereotypical views
about Blacks and Whites (McKay, 2015). The judge was previously heard using racial slurs and
making derogatory comments about Blacks. Despite these incidents, Roof was ultimately con­
victed of a slew of hate crime and murder charges, and sentenced to death. The African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) Church Massacre was paralleled by another act of domestic terrorism on the
campus of the University of Maryland. On May 20, 2017, Army 2nd Lt. Richard Collins III,
a graduating Black Bowie State University student, was stabbed to death by Sean Urbanski,
a White University of Maryland (UMD) student, on UMD’s campus. Urbanski was convicted of

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first-degree murder in 2019. However, to Bee's point, the judge threw out the hate crime change
before the jury had the chance to render a verdict on that count. This decision highlights the nor­
malcy of racism. Authorities discovered Urbanski’s ties to White supremacy groups on social
media. Over two years later and four stalled motion hearings, Urbanski still has not gone to trial.
When we look at these two events, we see two horrific incidents and how they speak to the
prevalence of domestic terrorism and structural racism. Domestic terrorism is when
U.S. citizens engage in incidents that use violence or force to intimidate a large segment of U.­
S. citizens. Just as foreign attacks of terrorism, such as 9/11, were used to create fear in American
lives, domestic terrorist acts are meant to instill fear and terror within the nation-state—in this
case Black Americans. Besides demonstrating acts of domestic terrorism, the locations of both of
these horrific acts prove to be significant—one was at a church and the other on a university
campus. Churches and universities are some of the few places where Blacks have found refuge
and the space to learn how to engage in racial uplift activism in order to progress the United
States to a more equitable place. Just as the Black community has found solace in these social
institutions, both Roof’s and Urbanski’s behavior were created, supported, and maintained by
these same social institutions through their connections to White supremacy.
What is important to understand is that the increase in violence toward Black and Brown
communities are not limited to just hate crimes; violence has also increased at the hands of
those who are sworn to protect minority communities against White supremacists—police
officers. Moreover, structural racism is not only seen through the socialization and domestic
terrorist acts of White supremacists, but it is also defined by the racialized acts of police offi­
cers. Officer-involved shootings in the United States have increased over the past two dec­
ades. After reaching an all-time low in the 1990s and early 2000s, officer-involved shootings
have substantially increased. In general, the rate of police involved killings in America is
about four times the rate in Canada, 22 times the rate in Australia, and 125 times the rate in
England (Zimring, 2017). Race, then, exacerbates the experiences that Whites versus racial
minorities have with police. High profile officer-involved killings of Blacks such as Michael
Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Koryn Gaines, Eric
Garner, John Crawford III, and Laquan McDonald have captured global attention. Among
youth, Blacks are 21 times more likely than Whites to be killed by police (Gabrielson, Jones,
and Sagara, 2015). Even when exclusively focusing on people who police officers report are
not attacking nor have a weapon, we still see huge racial disparities, with Blacks being 3.5
times more likely than Whites to be killed by police.
The rate of police killings in the United States compared to other countries is unfathom­
able on its own, but when including racial disparities in the understanding of these killings,
it is a troubling trend. The criminal justice system has allowed officers to evade punishment
and accountability for their actions (Alexander, 2010). In these incidents, there are rarely
charges for and even fewer convictions of police officers. Civil lawsuits for unjustified and
unlawful deaths fall onto taxpayer dollars. The criminal justice and judicial systems are allow­
ing police officers to kill Blacks at a higher rate, while someone else pays the bill. Some
cities like Chicago and Illinois have allocated funds for civil payouts for police brutality
settlements. The people who pay the consequences for the actions of the police are the resi­
dents of cities and municipalities who end up pay millions of dollars in civil settlements to
the families of people killed by police. For example, in 2018, the courts ruled that the first
shots fired by a police officer, which killed Korryn Gaines, were unreasonable and violated
her civil rights. After the verdict, the City of Baltimore originally settled with the Gaines
family for $37 million, which included a large sum of money for Gaines’ son who was also
shot during the incident. No amount of money can ever replace a person’s life, or give back

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the mother a child lost, but $37 million would go a long way in Baltimore, Maryland to
redevelop low-income Black neighborhoods and invest in schools and social programs to
improve employment opportunities and health outcomes. Instead, these taxpayer funds are
allocated for a settlement for a wrongful killing committed by a police officer.
Structural racism within the criminal justice system does not begin or end with wrongful
killings. Officer-involved shootings are just the tip of the iceberg as policies such as ‘stop and
frisk’ disproportionately discriminate and marginalize racial minorities. A study of New York
City police stops showed that Blacks and Latinos represented roughly 85% of stops despite
making up less than 30% of the city’s population. Of these stops, nearly 60% involved frisk­
ing and a large percentage involved criminal force. However, only 8% were arrested (with
a majority for resisting arrest) with 2% of stops resulted in contraband discovery (see Gilbert
and Ray 2016). This means that an overwhelming percentage of people who were stopped
were not committing any crimes.
Once in the criminal justice system, Blacks are also more likely than Whites to get con­
victed and receive longer prison sentences for similar crimes (Alexander, 2010). The enforce­
ment of ‘stand your ground’ laws also shows racial disparities. Whites are significantly more
likely than Blacks to be found not guilty when using stand your ground as a defense. Studies
on felony trials for similar crimes also shows similar racial disparities. A study of 700 felony
trials in Florida showed that a lack of racial diversity in the jury pool leads to Blacks being
significantly more likely to be convicted relative to Whites. Jury selection and how prosecu­
tors, defense attorneys, and judges might corroborate to suppress evidence and maintain the
police “blue wall of silence” can be extensive (Gonzalez Van Cleve, 2016).
When people are released from prison, racial disparities continue. Studies show that
Blacks with a criminal record face a much more difficult time finding a job relative to
Whites with a criminal record. In fact, Pager’s (2007) groundbreaking research showed that
Whites with a criminal record were more likely to get called back for jobs than Blacks with­
out a criminal record. Well known cities, such as New York City and Baltimore, are not
the only places plagued with policing issues. The Department of Justice had to intervene in
the Ferguson, Missouri police department for stopping, fining, and arresting Black motorists
with the purposes of generating financial revenue for the city government.
So, while Michael Brown became the apex for the Black Lives Matter movement, the
structural racism embedded within the Ferguson Police Department and the city was the
impetus. These issues are why nearly 85% of Blacks and slightly over 50% of Whites
believe there is a difference in the way that police treat Blacks relative to Whites (Pew
Research Center 2016). Despite this high percentage of Americans believing there to be
racial issues in policing, many people do not actively engage in anti-racist activities to
change the system. CRT and PHCRP provide some conceptual insights into these struc­
tural and psychological processes.

Critical race theory

We aimed to document above—via policing and the criminal justice system—how pervasive
structural racism is in the United States and how it continues to shape life chances and social
and economic outcomes. We believe that talking about structural racism is important, but
what is more important is discussing how we conceptualize the processes and mechanism
that undergird structural racism. Structural racism must be understood on institutional, con­
textual, and individual levels. To begin the conversation, Whites must be challenged to end
structural racism as we know it. Many women’s rights activists believe that if sexual

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harassment, sexual assault, and rape are to decrease, men must take it upon themselves to
hold other men accountable for the ways that toxic masculine culture seeps into social insti­
tutions to marginalize women. The same logic applies to racism. If structural racism is really
going to becoming a thing of the past, Whites must take the onus to ratify a procedural
justice perspective.
Critical race theory recognizes that racism is ingrained in the fabric and system of American
society (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Now, what is important to understand is that structural racism
can be dominant without an individual racist (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). This means we have
a racialized society to begin with, creating structurally racist institutions where Whites fre­
quently benefit from social, economic, and cultural privileges not bestowed onto racial minor­
ities. Critical race theory identifies that these racialized power structures are based on White
privilege and White supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.
Most people conceptualize racism as static and operating in individuals; however, racism
is fluid. It flows through structures that facilitate or inhibit mobility through social institu­
tions (like from a neighborhood to a school to a college to a job). For example, in 2015,
a group of Black and Latino teenagers in McKinney, Texas were accosted by police after
a group of mostly White adults called about a disturbance. During the encounter, now
former McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt was recorded throwing down a 15-year-old
girl in a bathing suit. Using its self-insurance risk pool, the city of McKinney settled the case
for $184,850 (Uhler, 2018). Former McKinney elementary school teacher Karen Fitzgibbons
was fired after stating the following about the incident:

This officer should not have to resign. I’m going to just go ahead and say it … the
Blacks are the ones causing the problems and this ‘racial tension.’ I guess that’s what
happens when you flunk out of school and have no education.
(Klein, 2015)

If a Black child were sitting in Karen Fitzgibbons’ classroom would they be taught
equally? As it relates to anti-racism, imagine how many teachers, administrators, and family
members knew about Fitzgibbons’ racist views and did nothing. These bystanders are com­
plicit in allowing racism to proliferate. As in McKinney, neighborhoods and schools are
linked together. Some of the same people who work at the schools live in the local neigh­
borhoods. When incidents with racist intent occur in these two social institutions, they are
not isolated or coincidental. They are highly interconnected.
Racism on a structural level is rooted in policies, laws, and legislation that allow differen­
tial treatment of individuals based on socially-ascribed racial categories. Unfortunately, pol­
icies lead to other teachers, just like some cops, committing one of the ultimate acts of
solidary with racists—silence as acceptance. Instead of calling out the racism, racism is dressed
up with pretty words through euphemisms and ignored.

Public health critical race praxis

Understanding the importance of how race and racism operate within the broader societal
structure is important to understand how the racially violent events discussed above affect
minority groups on an individual level. PHCRP is a framework which combines critical
race theory and public health theory as a means to best express how to understand and
address social and health issues, with the ultimate goal to achieve social justice for marginal­
ized groups (Gilbert and Ray, 2016). The inclusion of PHCRP is important because one

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cannot talk about the structural racism of our society without also discussing how it is
impacting the health of marginalized groups (Ford and Airhihenbuwa, 2010a; 2010b). Vio­
lent crimes, such as domestic terrorism, take a significant toll on marginalized groups. By
using the PHCRP framework, we aim to move the conversation forward to provide theor­
etical and policy recommendations.
Looking at the rates of justifiable homicides through the PHCRP lens gives a better
understanding of police behavior and how justifiable homicides have increased (Gilbert and
Ray, 2016). The PHCRP framework provides principles of: first, utilizing the primacy of
racialization principle to illuminate how racial stratification leads to unequal life
chances; second, utilizing the race as a social construct and gender as a social construct prin­
ciples in order to provide researchers with a lens to consider how criminalizing Blacks limits
healthy lifestyles; and third, utilizing the race consciousness and interdisciplinary self-critique
principles in order to push for policies to better understand five key components that lead to
officer-involved shootings:

1. racial biases
2. racial and gender consciousness
3. ways to provide more equitable policing practices
4. the enforcement of legal remedies for those who abuse power
5. the prevention of acts of discrimination by holding individuals culpable who informally
police Blacks.

Following the structural determinism principle of PHCRP, Gilbert and Ray (2016) state
that policy makers have clear guidelines they should follow to help the growth of anti-
racism ideologies and practices surrounding law enforcement behavior. In particular, they
note the importance of policy makers relying on valid and reliable research. The next section
discusses more direct ways to address “racially charged” incidents such as the ones previously
discussed and become more aware of anti-racism ideologies.

Racially inclusive sociological imagination framework

What do we as individuals do to obliterate structural racism and deal with individuals who
have the power and influence to make decisions with racist intent that have institutional
ramifications?
We suggest employing a “racially inclusive sociological imagination framework.” Accord­
ingly, we have three specific suggestions for people aiming to engage in anti-racism activism
in their daily lives. First, people can become “racial equity learners” by educating themselves
about the reality that racial inequality still exists and permeates every facet of the social
world. This is what we aimed to do with policing and criminal justice, above. The unfortu­
nate truth is that even if people think they do not experience race, they live it and may
benefit from it. Race affects everyone to such an extent that people who believe they do
not experience race maintain it even if they do not feel its tormented wrath directly.
Second, people should not only learn about race and racism, but they should also aim to
be a “racial equity advocate” by holding friends, family, and co-workers accountable for
what they think, say, and do about inequality. The fact is that in today’s society people live
highly segregated lives, which means they may never come into contact with marginalized
groups, ultimately leading to inequality being fostered because marginalized groups are not
present. Speak up for them. Accordingly, being an advocate is much deeper than simply

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being an ally. Allies can at times populate in silence. Advocacy requires direct action to
intervene in racist encounters, frequently by disrupting the normative interaction patterns of
the people that we care the most about.
Third, instead of simply asking for quota-type diversity, people can be a “racial equity
broker” with their employers, children’s schools, churches, and homeowners’ associations by
aiming to institute more policies and practices that allow for accountability, objective evalu­
ation, and transparency. We must be willing to look at our own institutions to ensure equit­
able policies and practices within our own neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools.
Evaluating and demanding transparency will highlight embedded forms of racial discrimin­
ation and their sources that would otherwise not be as overt. When the problem is identi­
fied, it makes it easier to rectify by implementing new practices and policies to vehemently
attack those sources with solutions to remove racism.
In order to be a racial equity learner, racial equity advocate, and racial equity broker, it is
important to implement a “racially-inclusive sociological imagination framework.” The
racially inclusive sociological imagination framework builds on the work of others who push
for the importance of centering racial justice (Meehan, Reinelt, and Perry, 2009; Potapchuk,
2004). We add to this body of knowledge by starting with the fundamental premise that in
order to center and engage in racial justice work, procedural justice must be at the forefront
of the theoretical model and implementation plan. It is very important for people to begin
by understanding and embracing the fact that social justice is “the premise that everyone
deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities” (Jiminez et al.,
2014: 1). Justice is typically broken down into two main categories—distributive and pro­
cedural. On one hand, distributive justice is the belief in equity and fairness; which of
course, most people believe in. Procedural justice, on the other hand, is the belief in an
equitable procedure to create equitable distributions.
The racially-inclusive sociological imagination framework includes five components: (1)
developing a diversity achievement ideology; (2) identifying trust points; (3) reducing impli­
cit bias; (4) creating brave spaces; and (5) engaging in racial uplift activism. These steps help
to change our everyday social interactions as well as the policies and practices that augment
hate speech and racial discrimination.

Develop a diversity achievement ideology

First, people have to develop a diversity achievement ideology. The diversity achievement
ideology includes four important components: (1) self-awareness; (2) social awareness; (3)
global awareness; and (4) agency. Self-awareness means an individual must begin to think
critically about the ways they view the world and why, and ultimately developing a holistic
life perspective. No one can be forced to do this; it is a personal endeavor. People have to
come in touch with what they believe morally, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and phys­
ically. They have to confront issues that might not allow them the ability to properly
develop a diversity achievement ideology. Often times, this means reflecting on major life
events and being able to understand the difference between an individual’s actions and the
social identities and groups they embody.
Becoming socially aware begins by learning the way that people view social identities.
Then, once a person gains the empirical knowledge about how marginalization among these
social identities operate, they must think critically and reflexively about how their own
social identities influence how others interact with them. The learning process cannot only
be knowledge gained; it must invoke a desire for critical analysis of what was learned. Next,

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people become globally aware by realizing that not all people are treated the same because
of their social identities. Finally, people then have to manufacture agency to enact change.
Becoming a racial equity learner is really captured by going through this process. It involves
much education, reading, studying, learning, and self-reflection.

Identify trust points

Second, people have to identify trust points in order to properly be a racial equity learner.
In particular, people have to identify trusted and objective media sites. Admittedly, media is
a competing curriculum. The difficulty with competing curricula mean they challenge our
ability to obtain empirical data on trends and distorts our power to interpret events as gener­
alizable, valid, and reliable. One way to potentially dilute certain agendas of media outlets is
to identify at least three sources about a current event. By having different sources, it allows
for the ability to compare and contrast the information being broadcasted. It also helps to
relate the learned information back to social theory and empirical trends. Outlets such as
Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public are important sources of information for rigor and
empirical analysis.
Altogether, people should not simply trust what they hear and see from only one
source. In the current media market, being first and getting ownership credit rather than
being correct is premium; viewers must be careful and patient to collect enough informa­
tion from multiple sources rather than just one. Then, the information gathered can be
compiled and analyzed with existing trends to determine if the event is an outlier or
within the norm. If this process is not thorough, people are examining events in
a vacuum, which can be dangerous.
Mainstream media is not the only competing curriculum, there is also social media. Social
media opened the doors of everyday people to generate and contribute to mass communica­
tion, but they also created an environment of faux expertise (Ray et al., 2017). Through
social media many people believe they are an expert on a topic even when they are not.
Additionally, most algorithms on social media platforms operate to give users content based
on what they like, click, and read. As a result, social media often reflect people’s own belief
systems rather than an objective view of social life (Ray and Gilbert, 2018).
Nonetheless, social media can be used as tools for social change to combat prejudicial
narratives while also maintain existing power structures. As a result of their unique material
history, social media show and tell us what people say and do in real time. They also bring
voices to those who traditionally do activist work in silence (Ray et al., 2017). Present day
activism has changed because social media circumvent traditional forms of publicity. Power
is placed in the hands of individuals who collectively join in solidarity for a common cause
or goal. Social media provide a behind-the-scenes look at how people are organizing and
communicating to create narratives that survive over time and become engrained in the
social consciousness of society (Ray and Gilbert, 2018).

Reduce implicit bias

Third, people need to aim to reduce implicit bias and become better racial equity learners
and advocates. Results of implicit association tests (IATs), taken by millions of Americans,
show the pervasiveness of prejudice about a host of outcomes (Greenwald, McGhee, and
Schwartz, 1998). As it relates to race and skin tone, people are more likely to have positive
preference towards Whites and people with lighter skin tones relative to Blacks and people

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with darker skin tones. Research on IATs also parallels what we see play out in social inter­
actions between police officers and Blacks with people being more likely to have a bias
toward Blacks with weapons compared to Whites with weapons.

Create brave spaces

Fourth, people have to transform racist spaces into brave spaces by having candid racial
conversations without racist intent. This is often difficult for people, but it is critical if
anyone is to be a racial equity advocate. Talking about race is difficult because rarely do
people talk about it to someone who is not of their same racial group. Brave spaces
mean allowing people to create a space where they can build bridges with people who
might have different views than themselves. Though universities mimic the racial segre­
gation that people experience in schools and neighborhoods (Ray and Rosow, 2012),
they are one of the rare spaces where people have the ability to (and at times are
encouraged to) interact with those who think completely differently than themselves. It
is most important to implement brave spaces were different ideas can be shared, espe­
cially since people’s lives are so segregated by race and class that we rarely have more
than superficial conversations with individuals of different social statuses. Converting
homogenous spaces into brave spaces is just as important since these are often the spaces
where people may have the most impact.

Engage in racial uplift activism

Finally, people have to engage in racial uplift activism. This component of the racially-
inclusive sociological imagination framework highlights what it means to be a racial equity
broker. There are four main practical approaches to engaging in racial uplift activism. First,
people can engage in civil rights by protesting, strategizing, educating and litigating for the
rights of individuals/groups. Second, people can engage in public policy by promoting the
rights of individuals/groups through acts designed to influence legislative decision making.
To make policy changes, people can call and email their local politicians and policy makers;
advocate for racially equitable policies, and bring attention to policies that may have racial­
ized (un)intended consequences. For example, a state may want to change the financial
thresholds for students qualifying for educational funding or increase the number of months
that someone is given as a mandatory minimal sentence. The racial implications for these
policies may be grave considering the racial wealth gap and the role of stop and frisk policies
in racial disparities in policing. As a citizen, people should express their concerns about racial
implications.
Third, people can participate in community service by engaging in hands-on activities to
better communities and individuals. Community service is not limited to serving at a local
soup kitchen, though that is important. This type of focused community service means
identifying thresholds where racial inequality exists and then using one’s skill set to help. For
example, a person could start a school or community garden. These programs have commu­
nity and educational benefits by increasing math, science, and reading test scores (Ray,
Fisher and Fisher-Maltese, 2016).
Finally, people can engage in philanthropy by raising and giving money to better the
lives of others or by raising funds for important causes. Funding can be raised to refurbish
the library and recreational centers that community members use for local events. Philan­
thropy does not always mean giving one’s own money if resources are limited. Rather, it

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may mean thinking of ways to expand how we think about philanthropy to include social
and cultural capital. There are a host of potential opportunities for people to make struc­
tural differences in people’s lives to mitigate structural racism.

Conclusion
This chapter aimed to establish a framework to leverage theories rooted in critical race to
think practically about ways to engage in anti-racism activism. By implementing a racially
inclusive sociological framework, people can become racial equity learners, racial equity
advocates, and racial equity brokers. As Jamelle Bouie (2014) said, “A generation that hates
racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation that, through its neglect, comes to perpetu­
ate it.” Employing a racially inclusive sociological imagination and being willing to be color
brave rather than colorblind helps to embody anti-racism activism.
For people engaging in anti-racism work, it is particularly important to have a theoretical
orientation to draw upon and implement. For doing activist work, the racially-inclusive
sociological framework is vital. For those engaging in empirical research, critical race theory
and the public health critical race praxis are important theories to utilize. All three of these
theories have key components that overlap and can be specifically applied to a variety of
empirical outcomes to engage in and study scholar-activism. Research on policing, the crim­
inal justice system, and the judicial system is especially fitting. Obviously, the overlap
between policing and health care is relevant, in addition to a host of other outcomes.
Potentially more pertinent to this global movement for Black Lives is for scholars to con­
duct research with and on actual activists. It is some sort of assumption that activists embody
ever-present identities rather than people who evolve into their activist selves. Researchers can
apply the theories highlighted in this chapter to learn about how people develop an activist
identity, how people then pursue their activist work and what we learn from it, and how vari­
ous strategies used by activists fit within the various components of the racially inclusive socio­
logical imagination framework. Admittedly, some people are better than others at
implementing effective activist strategies on the local, state, and federal levels. It is high time
for scholars to utilize better theoretical frameworks to make sense of the nuanced ways that
activists do their work, and are successful at making anti-racist change. The theories high­
lighted in this chapter help advance the scholarly and community-based participatory research
that informs much of the pursuits of scholar-activists. Advanced technologies allow scholars to
do this work in real time rather than waiting to comb through archives. Race scholars must
leverage these innovative empirical tools to evaluate social movements as they evolve.

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