Book launch and discussion with Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar

This event is cosponsored by the Media, Inequality and Change Center.

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and anthropologist Ruth Benedict called for teaching people, especially poor people, to be less prejudiced. 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 modernity. Thinkers like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon showed how racism was connected to colonialism and capitalism, a perspective adopted even by Martin Luther King.

Today, liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. As Arun Kundnani demonstrates, white liberals can heroically confront their own whiteness all they want, yet these structures remain.

This deeply researched and swift-moving narrative history tells the story of the two antiracisms and their fates. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became clear: fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots.

Arun Kundnani has been active in antiracist movements in Britain and the United States for three decades. He is a former editor of the journal Race & Class and was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. The Guardian has described him as "one of Britain’s best political writers.” He is author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2015) and What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism (Verso, 2023).

Deepa Kumar is an award-winning scholar, activist, and leading scholar on Islamophobia both nationally and internationally. She is Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her books include Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years Since 9/11 (Verso, 2021).