This is a talk I gave on June 23 at the conference, ‘Race-conscious and colorblind framings: converging and diverging trends in Europe and the Americas’, organized by the CERI and the INED at Sciences Po in Paris by Patrick Simon and Sarah Mazouz. In it, I talk about how the need to define what is and what is not racism is evidence of a postracial ‘white crisis’. Listen here

1. NOT RACISM: WHITE CRISIS AND THE POSTRACIAL
DENIAL OF RACE
Alana Lentin, Western Sydney University
Race-conscious and colorblind framings: converging and diverging trends in Europe and the Americas
Paris, June 22-23, 2017

2. INTRODUCTION
Resident at Grenfell Tower fire, London June 14 2017

6. POSTRACIAL BASICS
Race as the factor determining the
deserving versus the undeserving
Race as a diversity story
Separating the strands of race as a
technology of power.

11. “Racism is more objected to than understood in
sociology”
– Barnor Hesse, ‘Racism’s Alterity’ (2014: 141)

12. “Post-colonial theories of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism that
clutter the shelves of bookstores and the pages of syllabi in the
Anglo-American-dominated field of ‘ethnic and racial studies’ are
also ineffective and largely irrelevant in relation to these new
movements in Europe.
-Adrian Favell, 2008

14. “The challenge here is to distinguish between
white racism and white identity politics. The
latter may be clannish and insular, but it is not
the same as irrational hatred, fear or contempt
for another group — the normal definition of
racism.”
-David Goodhart

17. “The contrast between identity politics and class struggle in the widest sense,
be it through trade unions or at the ballot box, is that in class struggle
solidarity is mobilized in the service of your own interests whereas in
identity politics it means sacrificing for the interests of groups of others.
Identity-political altruism may therefore come more easily to the
economically better placed. To those not belonging to their group, it may
appear like egoistic interests camouflaged as charity—for example if the
urban middle classes, economically dependent on a rich supply of cheap
service labor, favor open borders for immigration.’
-Wolfgang Streeck