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'Race', Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary Classifications

Alana Lentin

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 Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 1, 2000

‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism:

Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations

ALANA LENTIN
European University Institute

ABSTRACT: This paper argues for the revisiting of classiŽcatory concepts currently in
use in the study of ‘race’, racism and anti-racism. It examines the proposition that
racist movements no longer promote discrimination on the grounds of a belief in
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biological differences but espouse a ‘differentialist’ racism based on a conviction in the

Žxity of culture, paradoxically ‘borrowed’ from culturally relativist anti-racist argu-
ments. A critique of the differentialist thesis developed by Pierre-André Taguieff is
presented based upon the writings of Etienne Balibar and Paul Gilroy. The former, by
grounding modern racism in the ideological universalism of the European Enlighten-
ment project, argues that the apportioning of blame to anti-racism for abetting the
advent of culturalist racism is unhelpfully conceived from a perspective which seeks to
deny the legitimacy of black and ethnic minority led alliances as a basis for anti-racist
struggles. The novel connection is made between these arguments and those of Paul
Gilroy (1998) who proposes the redundancy of the term ‘race’, even from pragmatist
perspectives, in the revitalisation of anti-racism as a viable opposition to contemporary
racist discourses. The argument is made that in order to dissect normative understand-
ings of ‘race’ it is necessary to follow the historical trajectory taken by racism in
becoming an inextricable component of the modern project. Anti-racism, thus, must be
seen as a multi-layered conict and, therefore, separate from its anti-fascist, anti-
colonialist, leftist and institutionalised forms. Evidence from recent interviews with
anti-racist activists points to their rejection of both ‘culturalist’ and ‘biological’
approaches to racism and towards broad alliances of community-led activists against
overt but also covert, institutionalised racist discrimination.

Introduction
The last decade in sociology and political science has witnessed a rising
predominance of themes in ethnicity and identity as explanations both for the
unprecedented explosion of ethnic conict in Europe post-1989 and for what
Billig (1995) terms ‘banal nationalism’, a paradoxical increase in the importance
of a communal belonging based on cultural heredity in an age seemingly
deŽned by cross-national communication and knowledge of the Other. A
concomitant debate in political philosophy has evolved, particularly in North
America, between liberals and communitarians, an issue largely forced by the
challenges and oppositions embedded in the ‘multiculturality’ (Anthias, 1997)
of contemporary western societies.
1350-4630 Print/1363-0296 On-line/00/010091-16 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
 92 Alana Lentin

In contrast, the discussion of ‘race’ has not Žgured as prominently in this

complex of ‘hot’ sociological, political and philosophical currents. Whilst
‘racism’ is still rightly regarded as an important source of institutionally
and individually based discrimination in contemporary western societies, this
appears to be due to the very centrality of ethnicity and the accompanying
need to explain the persistence of ‘ethnic tensions’ in societies that, at
least theoretically, have moved towards a ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor,
1994). In a normative sense, then, while ‘race’ can no longer be used as a
categorisation of human groups, it is understood that racism aficts members
of ethnic minority communities whose difference we no longer describe in
racial or biological terms. It may be argued that a problematisation of such
classiŽcatory categories leads, unhelpfully, to a discussion based merely on
semantics. However, the introduction of the concept of ‘racialisation’ (Balibar
and Wallerstein, 1991) to refer to the discrimination of groups and individuals
on the basis of perceived racial attributes is useful in pinpointing racism’s
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targets. Nevertheless, such a terminological discussion evades the very serious

issue that the demise in importance of discussions of ‘race’ and racism — in
any sense other than the heuristic — poses to the building of sociological
theory grounded in a commitment to anti-racism at a time when concomitant
racist discourses appear to have advanced signiŽcantly and in a sophisticated
manner.
Regardless of academia’s desire to move beyond ‘race’ and racism, the last
decade has witnessed both an increase in the observable forms of racism and
a re-analysis of the prevalent discourses characterising its self-understanding
(Taguieff, 1990). In contrast, anti-racism as a viable movement is perceived to
be subsumed by crisis (Gilroy, 1992), lacking unity, workable strategy and
public support. Both are shaped by the realities of societies characterised by a
general fragmentation of the symbolic cultural modes guiding the life struc-
tures of their populations, an increase in an immigration no longer categorised
as guest labour and a dismantling of welfare systems. The increasing ‘multicul-
turality’ of western societies is accompanied by a parallel inability to effectively
deal with its inevitable consequences — the racist discrimination of ethnically
or ‘racially’ different minorities, who highlight the alterity between the domi-
nant and subordinate groups inherent in today’s nation state.
Two seemingly conicting processes are at work in this context. On the one
hand, contemporary western societies are perceived as being multicultural, a
state actively promoted by the media and advertising industries, through
popular music and other cultural forms: diverse, dynamic and positive. On the
other hand, multiculturalism has been a liberal public policy, emerging from
North America, replacing assimilative strategies and emphasising the preser-
vation of cultural difference. Multiculturalism in this latter form has been
criticised (see Jakubowicz, 1984; Anthias, 1997; Parekh, 1993) for establishing a
clear separation between the domain of the public and that of the private by
concentrating on culture as the main determinant of difference and neglecting
the structural nature of racism and ethnocentrism. Seen in this light, the
multicultural environment perceived, by some, as positively diverse or, by
others, as a ‘solution’ to the social problems brought about by immigration
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 93

leads to the marginalisation and de-politicisation of the disproportionate power

relations in dominant-subordinate group interactions.
A discussion of the contemporary relevance of racism and anti-racism needs
to address the context in which they are played out. Racism and discrimination
should be brought back to the domain of the political but this cannot be done
without attention to contextual transformations — particularly in the urban
environment where racism and anti-racism are most often fashioned. Racism,
the possibilities for anti-racism, and the overall atmosphere of multiculturalism
must each be re-analysed in a context in which visible cultural differences, in
their discourses if not in every day reality, become more important than ever
before in the search for identities.
In this paper I will argue that to understand the crisis faced by anti-racism
as a movement in Europe at the turn of the millennium, three steps should be
taken.
· Closer attention should be paid to contemporary discourses that propose the
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advent of a ‘new’, ‘culturalist’ or ‘second degree’ racism in light of the extent

to which these arguments posit an antagonistic relationship between post-
war racism and an anti-racism described as facilitating the former’s increas-
ing acceptability.
· In response to this approach that seeks to pin the blame for new racist
discourses on the failures of the anti-racism movement, the centrality of
racism to the evolution of the European nation state and to the development
of universalist ideologies about ‘general ideas of man’ should be examined.
· Lastly, I will suggest that the use of ‘race’ as a critical concept can no longer
assist in Žghting racism, antisemitism and xenophobia.
In exploring these three points I will emphasise the work of three key
authors: Pierre-André Taguieff, Etienne Balibar and Paul Gilroy. I will pay
most attention to Balibar’s response to Taguieff’s proposal of a ‘neo’ or ‘second
degree’ racism and propose the existence of a continuum between the work of
Balibar and that of Gilroy. My objective is to show how these important
contributions can be drawn upon in an attempt to theorise anti-racist potential.
The development of these arguments in greater detail will lead me to the
proposal that a reformulation of anti-racism as a viable form of collective action
may take the form of the inter-ethnic alliances beginning to emerge in Europe
that seek to go beyond identity politics. To highlight the signiŽcance of these
new developments, I will draw on some examples from my own research in
progress of European anti-racist movements. Recent interviews with anti-racist
activists in the United Kingdom 1 revealed that alliances across different
minority ethnic and racialised groups as well as cross-national contacts are
increasingly important for strengthening the anti-racist message. This is of
particular importance at a time of enhanced activity around the introduction
of racist asylum and immigration legislation across the European Union.

Contemporary Racisms and the Centrality of Culture

Contemporary western societies have become increasingly multi-ethnic, lead-
 94 Alana Lentin

ing to the popular perception based on observations of large cosmopolitan

cities (such as London, Paris or Amsterdam) that cultural diversity is a fully
accepted phenomenon. For this reason the persistence of racism and the
success in various countries of far-right wing parties with a strong anti-
immigrant manifesto is of signiŽcant concern. It is against this setting that
writers such as the French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff have introduced
the notion of a ‘neo-racism’, based, not on biological, but upon cultural
differentiation between peoples. 2
Pierre-André Taguieff’s theorisation of a new racism, founded upon the
view of cultures as Žxed, is strongly linked to his attempt to point out the role
of anti-racism in facilitating this phenomenon. Taguieff develops the notion of
a differentialist racism based on the Žxity of culture which renders both
‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’ incomplete as terms seeking to explain the intricacy
of this oppositionary complex (Taguieff, 1991). His argument is based on
twentieth century developments in anthropology that weakened the biological
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theorisation of superior and inferior ‘races’ and made ‘ofŽcial’ the notion that
the existence of human ‘races’ has no scientiŽc bearing. What evolved, how-
ever, due to the work of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961)
and the growing acceptability of culture rather than ‘race’ as a primary marker
of difference, was the notion of cultural relativism upon which, Taguieff claims,
anti-racism based itself.
The emerging anti-racist tradition constructed itself around the beliefs that
cultural phenomena are of an autonomous nature, that cultural determinism
thus dominates both mentality and lifestyle, and that all cultures should be
valued equally. With this, Taguieff appears to blame anti-racists for declaring
the nullity of racial differentiation as a viable concept and replacing it with the
semantically interchangeable term ‘culture’, the positive nature of which could
be easily subscribed to but whose deterministic properties had not been
properly thought out. In more direct terms, the notion of cultural differen-
tiation as equally valorised presents no problem to left-leaning, western
thinkers in so far as it is contained in anthropological Želd research. The idea
becomes problematic when contextualised in the form of European-bound
immigration. This approach is echoed by the current debate on the limits of
communitarianism and is visible in Habermas’ writings on the effect that a
‘tremendous inux of immigration’ (Habermas, 1995, p. 255) may have on the
stability of western European societies. Indeed, the advent of social-democrat
governments in all four of Europe’s largest states does not seem to have altered
hard-line, racially biased approaches to immigration (Bloch, 1999).
Taguieff shows anti-racist thinking to have developed, regardless of the
inuence of culturalist moves in anthropology, along the lines of an opposition
to a racism still perceived literally to be racist in the biological sense. This view
of racist opposition was based on anti-racism’s inability to sever the linkages in
the ‘hostility to difference-annihilation/genocide’ continuum, founded upon
the experience of the Nazi Shoah. However, lack of evidence for connecting
contemporary racism against immigrants to the horrors of recent history led to
the formulation of economic arguments for the explanation of intolerant
attitudes which, however unwillingly, justiŽed working class phobias against
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 95

foreigners. This double victimisation was the outcome of the deliberate attempt
by the capitalist class to serve its own interests, diffusing racial prejudice to
mask class hegemony.
Taguieff seeks to show that whilst anti-racism was being subsumed by
economic/colonialist arguments, racism itself was learning from the initial
trigger for these very ideas — the notion of cultural rather than biological
difference. To be clear, it is proposed that anti-racist thought was based on
three pinnacles: the invalidity of ‘race’, the centrality of cultural difference, and
the equal status of all cultures. These principles are at the core of arguments for
cultural relativism. At the same time, the proliferation of racist attitudes
amongst the working classes was explained in terms of traditional class
conict. This need to excuse the racism of the white working class still sticks
in the side of the progressive anti-racist movement today (interview with
CARF, 1999). On the other hand, racism as diffused by the bourgeoisie, was
held to be based on a belief in the hierarchisation of biological races that, in the
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extreme, would lead to human genocide. Anti-racism as a movement sought,

in reaction, to combat racism by insisting upon the equal valorisation of all
cultures and a respect for difference. This, for Taguieff, was anti-racism’s
gravest error.
A problematisation of Taguieff’s contribution has been proposed by Etienne
Balibar. In his summary of Taguieff’s work, Balibar concludes:

From the logical point of view, differentialist racism is a meta-racism, or

what we may call a ‘second-position’ racism, which presents itself as
having drawn the lessons from the conict between racism and anti-
racism, as a politically operational theory of the causes of social ag-
gression. If you want to avoid racism, you have to avoid that ‘abstract’
anti-racism which fails to grasp the psychological and sociological laws
of human population movements; you have to respect the ‘tolerance
thresholds’ maintain ‘cultural distances’ or, in other words, in accord-
ance with the postulate that individuals are the exclusive heirs and
bearers of a single culture, segregate collectivities (the best barrier in this
regard still being national frontiers). (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991,
p. 23)

This reading of Taguieff, highlights the problematic nature of his insistence

on a culturalist racism which replaces the ‘traditional’ view of human popula-
tions differentiated on the basis of biological ‘race’. Taguieff sees this new
racism as purposefully veiling its purer form, biological racism. In retaliation,
he argues, anti-racism should adjust its orientation in recognition of the toned
down cultural discourse of the new Right. His emphasis on the need to tackle
new-Rightist strategy masks anti-racism’s growing concern with racism as a
diffused phenomenon, more pervasive and, arguably, more dangerous, in its
institutionalised forms. Indeed, Taguieff’s position reveals his strong situation
in the context of the French debate on racism.3 According to Phil Cohen, in the
British context

the new racism thesis provided an important intellectual resource for the
 96 Alana Lentin

anti-racist movement, enabling it to shift its attention beyond the violent,

aversive forms of popular racism towards the more subtle and invisible
aspects of cultural stereotyping and discrimination, especially as these
operated within the institutions of civil governance. (Cohen, 1999, p. 4)
In essence, the more correct argument appears to be that there is no
signiŽcant difference between theories that seek to justify the discrimination of
the Other, whether they be biological or cultural. It is not simply that if
anti-racism were to realise that racism no longer believes in biologically
determined differentiation and has now itself taken up the cultural relativists’
call for the unicity of culture that it could become a viable movement. What in
fact appears to be at the root of placing the blame at anti-racism’s door is rather
an exasperation at the failure of assimilative strategies. Thus, Taguieff appears
to be following a current in French anti-racism that calls for the right of
‘immigrants’ (second and third generations included) to integrate into French
society. Harlem Désir, leader of SOS Racisme in the 1980s stated: ‘For us
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integration is primarily the rejection of exclusion, the rejection of the ghetto

which includes the cultural ghetto’ (Désir, cited in Lloyd, 1996). This statement
reects the tendency of French mainstream anti-racism to frame racism in the
context of human rights, stressing the individual’s right to freedom and
equality despite group-based discrimination.
Universalist calls for the fading out of difference through the assimilation of
minority cultures have blended into a politics of integration which, although
recognising their existence, sees all cultural groups as internally homogeneous
(Wieviorka, 1997; Yuval-Davis, 1997). The concern displayed with the failure of
both approaches, both as principles and as policies of western states, is evident
in much of the contemporary liberal versus communitarian debate. Both sides
often arrive at similar conclusions when discussing the handling of ‘illiberal
groups’ (Kymlicka, 1989), perceived as unable or ‘unwilling’ to become a
seamless part of western society. The view which sees minority ethnic or
racialised groups as responsible for what is often viewed as their failure to
adjust to the demands of the states in which they live, fails to problematise the
inequality of the power relationships which govern the way we live in
‘multicultural’ societies.
Consequently, culturalist racism, rather than being a clever mechanism
initiated by new Right-wing parties to gain face, permeates state institutional
and, thus, individual conceptions of difference conceived as ‘race’-based. It
therefore cannot be said to be due to the failures of anti-racism, as Taguieff
suggests. Racism of this type is inherent in state, institutional, class-based and
individual participation in the legitimation of an established dominant culture.
Thus, neither is it a new phenomenon.
There is, no doubt, a speciŽcally French brand of the doctrines of
Aryanism, anthropometry and biological geneticism, but the true
‘French ideology’ is not to be found in these: it lies rather in the idea that
the culture of the ‘land of the Rights of Man’ has been entrusted with a
universal mission to educate the human race. There corresponds to this
mission a practise of assimilating dominated populations and a conse-
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 97

quent need to differentiate and rank individuals and groups in terms of

their greater or lesser aptitude for — or resistance to — assimilation.
(Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991)
All western states minimise the effect of the presence of non-national
peoples (minority ethnic and racialised groups) on the societal status quo
through assimilation or, latterly, integration. Whether by playing down (as-
similating) or playing on (integrating) cultural difference, states play a pater-
nalistic role that entrenches racist attitudes. Bauman describes the process thus:
With the progressive universalisation of the human condition — which
means nothing else but the uprooting of all parochiality and the powers
bent on preserving it, and consequently setting human development free
of the stultifying impact of the accident of birth — that predetermined,
stronger-than-human-choice diversity will fade away. (Bauman, 1997,
p. 48)
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The continuing co-existence of minority ethnic and religious groups and people
of colour alongside so-called nationals serves as a constant reminder of the
shortcomings of universalist idealism inasmuch as it involves a top-down
imposition of standards, values and behaviour.

The Janus Face of Universalism

In order to understand the origins of a so-called ‘culturalist’ racism and its
proposed emergence through anti-racist cultural relativism, it is helpful to
examine the relationship between racism as both discourse and practice and
the ideology of universalism that has deŽned western thinking about humanity
for the last two centuries. By doing this I hope to show that the proposal of a
‘new’ culturalist (rather than biological) racism ignores the historical evidence
that shows that this is no new concept. Antisemitism is the primary example
of this type of ‘racism without race’. Moreover, it is ethnic, religious or
racialised difference per se around which racism moulds its arguments for
discrimination.
Etienne Balibar proposes that the negation of difference is central to racist
discourse through his argument for the compatibility of racism and universal-
ism:
universalism and racism are indeed (determinate) contraries, and this is
why each of them has the other inside itself — or is bound to affect the
other from the inside. (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, p. 198)
Linked as it is to the very foundations of a universalist ideology, emerging out
of Enlightenment philosophy, the belief that moral equality is a natural
entitlement of the ‘brotherhood of man’,4 racism, like sexism, becomes the
prism through which we may understand the very possibility of talking about
a universalist ideal. In other words, both racism and sexism serve to justify the
fact that there are always exemptions to inclusion in universal humanity. This
can also explain why several criteria of demarcation may serve to exclude those
 98 Alana Lentin

seen as different. Culture has provided to this end in some contexts whereas
biology has proved equally effective in others.
Therefore, the semantic nature of the culture versus biology debate enlarged
by Taguieff, obfuscates the point made by Balibar, that racism, in both its
biological and cultural forms, has been inseparable from the task of creating a
‘general idea of man’ (Balibar, 1994, p. 198), itself confounded by images of
superiority and inferiority in which the quest for the Übermensch is implicit.
The construction of universally rational man necessitates a deŽnition in relation
to some Other that, in turn, demands a hierarchisation of human beings,
ranked in relation to the universal ideal. Taken a step further, such categorisa-
tions lead to Žxing the boundaries that encompass our deŽnitions of humanity
which, in the practices of certain European philosophical traditions, have been
founded upon the Eurocentric perspective that structures the patterns of
exclusion and inclusion from a universal point of view that sees Europe as its
centre.
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Balibar’s proposal that racism and universalism, rather than being reducible
to one another, contain each within itself leads to a constant questioning of
who you are in a certain social world, why there are some compulsory
places in this world to which you must adapt yourself, imposing upon
yourself a certain univocal identity. (Balibar, 1994, p. 200)
Racism provides the answer to the universal dilemma that seeks to homogenise
us when, in fact, we feel different and strive towards uniqueness. It is because
there is difference that these feelings are aroused in us and it is because there
are Others who point out this very difference that we are sometimes compelled
to exclude or enact violence against them. Racism is inextricable from univer-
salism and, thus, apparently perennial, because:
We are different, and, tautologically because difference is the universal
essence of what we are — not singular, individual difference, but
collective differences, made of analogies and, ultimately, of similarities.
The core of this mode of thought might very well be this common logic:
differences among men are differences among sets of similar individuals
(which for this reason can be ‘identiŽed’). (Balibar, 1994, p. 200)
Taking this into account, the reaction of anti-racism should concern itself less
with what speciŽc weapons are used to point out difference or model a
hierarchisation of peoples. Rather, racism for Balibar should be seen as a
mode of thought, that is to say a mode of connecting not only words
with objects, but more profoundly, words with images, in order to create
concepts. (Balibar, 1994, p. 200)
Challenging racism thus means changing a way of thinking which has become
essential to the view of our western selves, created in the tradition of modern
European Enlightenment philosophy and pervasive of daily thought and
behaviour.
Balibar’s historically based argument is useful in pointing out the problems
involved in the new racism thesis. By relating both cultural and biological
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 99

arguments for the subordination of the racialised in society to the core of

universalism, Balibar successfully points out the Janus-faced nature of ideals
such as individual human rights. Their location in a universalising tendency
that grants the right of individual freedom while concomitantly perceiving and
classifying minority groups as internally homogeneous is especially problem-
atic when used in anti-racist discourse. However, Balibar’s emphasis on ‘feel-
ings’ of difference — essentially individual — detracts somewhat from the
force of his argument. Implying that racism is bound up with feeling different
from others unlike ourselves may be seen as implying that feelings can be
changed by challenging individual prejudices or allegiances alone. Despite his
critique of Taguieff, Balibar may be read as falling into a similar trap by
avoiding an institutional and, thus, political reading of racism. By seeing
racism as a ‘mode of thought’ Balibar avoids talking explicitly about racism in
terms of the uneven power relations exercised in contemporary societies.
However, if we read Balibar from such a structural perspective it is possible to
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see racism as so ingrained in both the institutions of state policy and practice
and the ideologies that guide them that it appears to be like a ‘mode of
thought’ or a Žxed attitude.

Rejecting ‘Race’ as a Critical Concept

Paul Gilroy (1998) has recently called for an end to the use of ‘race’ as a critical
concept. His proposal, I suggest, may be linked to Balibar’s demonstration of
the dangers in essentialising either the biological or cultural signiŽers of
difference purportedly used in ‘original’ and ‘neo’ racisms respectively. It can
also be seen as emerging from Gilroy’s increasingly critical stance on the
appropriation of anti-racism by institutions and self-interested lobbies (1992)
and his strong opposition to the de-politicisation of anti-racism as a viable
movement:
a Želd from which politics has been banished, and where the easy
invocation of ‘race’ is regular conŽrmation of the retreat of the political.
(Gilroy, 1998, p. 839)
Gilroy bases a substantial part of his argument upon the importance of
contemporary developments in technology which create ‘new histories
of visuality and perception’ (Gilroy, 1998, p. 839) and radically transform
notions of ‘absolute identity’ from which new and competing subjectivities
emerge.
Have you, has your body been scanned? (asks Gilroy). Do you recognise
its changing optic density? If so, I would like you to consider that
development as another sign that we can let the old visual signatures of
‘race’ go. Having waved them farewell, it is possible that we shall do a
better job of countering the racisms, the injustices, that they brought into
being if we make a more consistent effort to de-nature and de-ontologize
‘race’ and thereby to disaggregate raciologies. (Gilroy, 1998, p. 839)
What Gilroy is asserting should not be confused with Taguieff’s rejection of
 100 Alana Lentin

biology in favour of culture in the quest to understand racist ideologies. Rather,

‘race’ can no longer be an effective classiŽcatory category, even in the political
terms in which it has been employed (for example, in the discourse on ‘political
blackness’) because of the way in which it has been commodiŽed in daily life.
On the one hand, as Gilroy points out, if even anti-racist activists retain racial
deŽnitions of difference what chance is there of convincing others that in real
terms it has no meaning. On the other, the pervasive usage of racial categorisa-
tion in the domain of advertising and the media, promoting difference as
positive, has paradoxically led to the situation in which ‘race’ cannot be
abandoned because in that world of ‘privatised, corporate multicultural-
ism … racial alterity has acquired an important commercial value’ (Gilroy,
1998, p. 843).
The problem of evoking ‘race’ as a critical concept, and, I add, most likely
the reason why culture seems now to dominate racist discourse, is that we no
longer so readily equate observable differences with consequential physical
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realities. The unimaginable speed of recent developments in technology, but

also the Žrst-hand knowledge brought about by greater mobility, have made
the theoretical notion of biological racial difference untenable:
On what scale is human sameness, human diversity now to be cali-
brated? In the instability of scale that characterises our episteme, how is
racialised and racialising identity to be imagined when we know that it
has already been imaged? (Gilroy, 1998, pp. 843–44)
What these observations bring Gilroy to is an understanding, in accordance
with Balibar, that to conceive racism, to develop useful critical concepts and to
tentatively reformulate anti-racism, it is imperative to locate historically the
unfurling of the notion of ‘race’. Such a task requires the relation of macro
historical conditions to congruent subjective developments in individuals’
self-understandings. ‘ScientiŽc’ racism, for Gilroy, accompanying the onset of
modernity, became the point at which ‘enlightenment and myth’ (Gilroy, 1998,
p. 843) met. Accompanied by nationality, the bonds created by ‘race’, legiti-
mated by their couching in the modern language of ‘provable’ biological
science, gave meaning to our pre-modern, instinctive understandings of our-
selves. Thus,
‘race’ may be modernity’s most pernicious signature. It articulated
reason and unreason. It knitted together science and superstition.
(Gilroy, 1998, p. 843)
Biological ‘race’ and the practice of racism allowed pre-modern knowledge
about modes of belonging to persist in an age in which the non-reasonable was
otherwise scorned. This echoes Balibar’s (1994) claim that racism itself created
its own communities, grounded in the safety of sameness which the modern
Enlightenment project and its quest for universalism engendered. Communities
of (homogeneous) identity were possible where overriding ideology placed
them at the top of a universal hierarchy.
Gilroy does not, indeed cannot, provide the answers to the dilemmas he
poses in his provocative paper. He is, like most contemporary students of
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 101

‘race’, racism and anti-racism, haunted by the problem inherent in the recogni-
tion of the critical futility of employing ‘race’ as a category and the concomitant
realisation that, without these tried and tested concepts, anti-racism increas-
ingly loses meaning. This is the point of Gilroy’s anger in his 1992 declaration
of the ‘End of anti-racism’ where he condemns anti-racism in its institutional,
party-political and anti-fascist forms, an anti-racism that
trivialises the struggle against racism and isolates it from other political
antagonisms — from the contradiction between capital and labour, from
the battle between men and women. It suggests that racism can be
eliminated on its own because it is readily extricable from everything
else. (Gilroy, 1992, p. 50)
Gilroy’s proposal to abolish ‘race’ as a critical concept should not, however,
be confused with a denial of anti-racism as a necessary principle and practice.
Gilroy reects the signiŽcant changes taking place amongst organised anti-
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racists since his observation of anti-racism’s crisis in 1992. Particularly in the

British context, from which Gilroy wrote, a series of events marked the turning
point for an anti-racism overtaken by interest groups, political parties and an
anti-fascist discourse bearing little resemblance to the institutional racism
experienced in contemporary society. The inquiry into the death of black
teenager Stephen Lawrence and the mobilisation by Bangladeshis against the
election of a British National Party candidate in the Tower Hamlets area of
London brought about a less entrenched anti-racism. Campaigns of this nature
were the Žrst to be both broad-based, attracting a record rate of public support,
and community-led, signifying the acceptance of the end of an appropriated
anti-racism (interview with NAAR, 1999). In London, and equivalent cities, the
positive proliferation of black culture alongside the disproportionate violence
and discrimination against racialised communities makes a rejection of ‘race’ as
a means of classiŽcation possible. The paradox of a situation in which black-
ness permeates daily experience to such an extent to make it banal highlights
the outrageousness of targeting this group over any other for unequal
treatment.
This current reality connects to the points made by both Gilroy and Balibar
in the former’s proposal to banish ‘race’ from anti-racist discourse and in the
latter’s reminder that dwelling on categorisation (science versus culture) will
not change the marginalised situation of the racialised. Tackling the phenom-
enon at its structural, political core appears, therefore, to be the only way of
usefully combating racism. Moreover, an overemphasis on categorisation,
particularly in attempts to ‘Žght racism on its own terms’, as suggested by
Taguieff in his warning to anti-racism to note parallel shifts in racist discourse,
have already proved unreliable. Gilroy makes this point by referring to the
problems inherent in pragmatic stances that adopt racialised terminology. This
is further echoed by Modood (1997) who explains how the emphasis on
‘political blackness’ that dominated British anti-racism during the 1970s and
1980s resulted in the exclusion of Muslims from the anti-racist struggle. As
racism is necessarily a heterogeneous phenomenon so too must anti-racisms be
developed that include, to the maximum, the various voices of racialised and
 102 Alana Lentin

ethnic minority communities in western societies. The Žnal section of the paper
will attempt to draw together the main points made by illustrating initiatives
that have been taken to this end.

Anti-racist Responses
Anti-racism movements in Europe represent a diverse range of associations
and platforms, differing signiŽcantly from country to country. This lack of
unity has been perceived as leading anti-racism into crisis (Gilroy, 1992;
interview with CARF, 1999), mainly inasmuch as conicting viewpoints be-
come entrenched thus denying the possibility of co-operation. This problem
has been further confounded in recent years with the introduction of various
institutional initiatives for tackling racism. Movements often Žnd themselves in
uneasy collaboration with supranational institutions such as the European
Commission, risking outright rejection which denies them any inuence over
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pan-European processes. This is reected by the views of the Campaign

Against Racism and Fascism (CARF):5
In terms of European Union … There was money going out to fund
anti-racist projects. I mean nobody’s going to be purist and say we don’t
want the money because we’re all desperate for money, without which
you can’t do your work, if you haven’t got any money you’re just going
to collapse. But certainly from our perspective — I don’t think we got
any money from the European Union at all — is that I think what was
funded was not anti-racist work, was cultural work, multicultural work.
The best way to get funding was multicultural work, not stuff that was
going to be critical of state institutions. (Interview with CARF, 1999)
Representation is another issue confounding collaboration with transna-
tional institutional initiatives with many organisations insisting on black and
ethnic minority leadership and others still rejecting the signiŽcance of this form
of empowerment. Amongst coalition based movements, recent interviews that
I carried out with activists revealed a growing tendency to go beyond these
perennial stumbling blocks. Organisations such as the National Assembly
Against Racism (NAAR) and the 1990 Trust in the UK, while stressing black
leadership, did not refuse co-operation with other organisations sharing their
basic aims on both national and international levels. This view is illustrated in
the following interview extract with the National Assembly Against Racism:6
The sort of deŽning point of the National Assembly is (1) that the people
who experience racism, that is in the Žrst instance today, black — that
is Asian, African, Caribbean people in Britain — have to play the leading
role in the Žght against racism and that is not just a matter of lip-service
that has to be in any organisation written in and constitutionally
organised … That’s number one and then number two, that the anti-
racist movement has to be an alliance, it can’t be one particular current
imposing its view, analysis and agenda on the whole movement and
therefore the way the anti-racist movement has to work — or how the
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 103

National Assembly has to work — is that it has to discuss and take its
own initiative, Žght against every obvious appearance of racism in this
society but it also has to be willing to support and promote the issues
and campaigns taken up by others if they’re genuinely against racism.
And that it may have to work in coalition with other organisations in
order to take forward speciŽc campaigns and initiatives. (Interview with
NAAR, 1999)
Both of the above comments reect the importance of tackling racism from
a perspective that is politically critical, black and ethnic minority led and based
on broad alliances. This approach poses a direct challenge to both state and
international institutions charged with dealing with racism and sectors of
non-government that concentrate on overt racism and neo-Nazism, on the one
hand, or the promotion of multiculturalism seen as insufŽcient, on the other.
These alliance-based movements call for anti-racism to Žght racism beyond its
crude fascist forms and on the basis of a structural politicised strategy that
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rejects the notion that multicultural understanding is the panacea for racist
‘attitudes’. Both Balibar and Gilroy’s arguments for the need to get beyond
both ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ explanations for racism are evident here. These
arguments are apparent in the following comments.
Concerning multiculturalist approaches:
[In the] Overcome Racism Now initiative their7 whole thing was to say
people are making an exaggerated fuss about this because there are
actually very tiny numbers of black people in these cities so they wanted
the Žgures to show there’s only really 2%. I said well, excuse me, you
know in London there are 33–34% black and ethnic minority people and
our point is not that this is small, it’s big and therefore London and
government and London government have to change to reect the
reality of London not to try to push it into a corner. (Interview with
NAAR, 1999)
Concerning institutionalised identity politics:
I think our perspective has enabled us to critique identity politics and
see what’s wrong with them. I mean, for instance there was a time in the
1980s after the riots here where different strategies for Žghting racism
were advocated like racial awareness training which is very much based
on identity politics and was based on the idea that racism equals
prejudice. So, the idea was that the way to get rid of racism was to
actually get people who were working in the police force, in local
government and to take them for racial awareness training and to
basically — it sort of worked that white people were given a grilling
about their own personal racism and so they were made to feel terribly
guilty and break down and cry. And we were always very much
opposed to all those things because, you know, we have … our politics
come out of the belief that racism isn’t about individual prejudice, it’s
about institutions, what institutions do. And in many ways a lot of the
 104 Alana Lentin

things that we have said over the years have been vindicated now with
the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the ruling about institutionalised
racism. (Interview with CARF, 1999)

These illustrations of the concerns of anti-racist activists support the main

points made in the theoretical body of the paper. Progressive coalitions of
anti-racists tend to reject culturalist arguments for the promotion of racial
equality as advocated by Taguieff. In practice this is reected in a justiŽed
scepticism of depoliticised, multiculturally orientated campaigns or

something celebrating cultural diversity or bringing different ethnic

groups together. I think those were the sort of things the European
Union were interested in. (interview with CARF, 1999).

But there is also a rejection of what can be termed ‘biological’ or ‘race’ based
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arguments in support of Gilroy. This runs along two lines. Firstly, there is
strong realisation that targeting neo-Nazism and the far right alone, though
vital, is insufŽcient. Secondly, the emphasis placed on black and ethnic min-
ority leadership in broad alliances negates treating ‘race’ as a special mode of
classiŽcation. As Gilroy claims, the familiarity with blackness, at least in
modern urban societies, empties ‘race’ even of its pragmatic signiŽcance. The
aim today is not to talk about the racialised. Rather, the leadership by black
and ethnic minority people of organisations reecting their concerns becomes
a norm that may help towards accepting non-whiteness or ethnic difference as
a fact of life rather than an ‘anthropological category’.

Conclusions
Three main points have been made in the course of this paper that are crucial
to any project that aims to lay the ground for a rethinking of anti-racism as
discourse and practice.
Firstly, coming to an understanding of the structural embeddedness of
racism in western societies necessitates a historical perspective showing how
the universalising rationalisation of human differences effectively shaped the
acceptability of exclusion, leading, in the worst case, to the Nazi Shoah.
Secondly, the current proposal to draw a line between ‘old’ biological
racism and ‘new’ cultural racism denies the point that aversion to difference per
se and not particular biological or cultural traits leads to the persistence of
racism over time. The link made by writers such as Taguieff to the insistence
of anti-racism on the diversity of equal cultures can only be seen as an
exasperated (and in some senses justiŽable) dig at contemporary ‘multicultural-
ism’.
Finally, an abandonment of ‘race’ as a critical concept is proposed in an era
when intermingling between different ethnic groups and the proliferation of
black and other minority cultures increases yet racism continues to exist. A
reframing of anti-racism as a political project that engages directly with the
structures into which it is built is necessary to avoid a racist discourse that
 ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary ClassiŽcations 105

stresses identity, community, culture and tradition and neglects intersectional-

ity and, most importantly, politics.

Alana Lentin is a Researcher at the Department of Social and Political Sciences,

European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini 9, I-50016 San
Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy, tel: 1 39 00 291 117, e-mail: lentin@datacomm.iue.it,
web page: http://www.iue.it/Personal/Researchers/Lentin.

Notes
1. These interviews were carried out as part of my research on European
anti-racist movements. Interviews in the UK and Ireland have been carried
out in the Žrst stage of a project also looking at movements in several other
western European countries. The project will eventually group together a
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number of activists from different organisations and countries in an inter-

active action-based research in part using the Internet in addition to
face-to-face meetings.
2. Note that while the neo-racist thesis has been associated with the French
literature on the subject and is strongly related to the rise of the Front
National in that country, British writers have also concerned themselves
with the emergence of a new racism (see Barker, 1981; Gordon, 1989).
3. Taguieff’s concentration on new right-wing discourse and the lack of
attention he pays to the broader realms of institutional racism may be put
down to his situation in the French context where such debates have not
come as strongly to the fore. This is due, in part, to the success of the Front
National, a phenomenon only mirrored more recently in other European
countries (e.g. Switzerland and Austria).
4. The phrase ‘Brotherhood of Man’ is used by Immanuel Wallerstein (1988)
to point out that it was not inclusive of women but neither of non
European, non-white men.
5. A representative of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism was
interviewed by the author in November 1999.
6. A representative of the National Assembly Against Racism was
interviewed by the author in November 1999.
7. The interviewee is referring to the Italian initiators of the project, ARCI.

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