ABSTRACT
The twentieth century has been witness to many examples of racial hatred and dominance, of ethnic exclusion and marginalisation, of wars fought, conquests made and genocides undertaken, in the name of ‘blood’ and ‘kin’. Whether the twenty-first century endures a similar fate depends on those forces that oppose the development and dissemination of racist attitudes and practices. It depends, in other words, on antiracism. The prospects of success are not helped by the fact that over recent years a certain complacency has grown up around matters of race and racism. ‘No one believes in biological hierarchy any more’ we are told: anti-racism is irrelevant, an anachronism. Indeed, as Chapter 5 indicated, anti-racism appears to annoy many commentators; they stereotype it, construct it as risible, then mock their own creation. And so one of the twentieth century’s most complex and diverse forces of resistance to oppression and social terror is alienated from ordinary people, cut off from social ownership: a resource for enabling humane societies and humane solutions to future conflict is deprived of support and serious debate. It is necessary to explain, then, that anti-racism has rarely simply been about opposition to biological racism. It certainly contains that tradition (and it is worth noting that it is a tradition that, despite being an ‘anachronism’ among the scientific and intellectual community, finds itself in many countries engaged in combating rising levels of neo-Nazi racism). But anti-racism has also engaged many other forms of discriminatory discourse, such as the naturalisation of ethnic
difference, the practice of cultural and religious exclusion, and the formation of negative and homogenising attitudes towards outcast and ‘othered’ groups.
