What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism (John Eleen Lecture)

Speaker: Arun Kundnani. Author of What is Antiracism? (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007), and former editor of the journal Race & Class.

Commentary: Abigail Bakan. Professor, Social Justice Education department at OISE, University of Toronto

What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism

Responding to Nazism, liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Here lies the origin of today’s liberal antiracism, from diversity training to Hollywood activism. Meanwhile, a more radical antiracism flowered in the Third World. Anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of colonialism and capitalism. Liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. But a viable radical alternative needs to be clearer on how it understands the structures it wishes to dismantle. Racism today is not simply a legacy of a white supremacist past but the result of neoliberalism’s reconstruction of racism and colonialism since the 1970s; an aspect of our recent past that is ignored by scholars of neoliberalism.