ABSTRACT
The contextual and situational role of culture and identity in the struggles against racism has been one of the main issues within policy and academic debates. It is also an important element in the rejection of the old polarity between anti-racism and multiculturalism. Anti-racist politics have tended to pay little attention to the role of culture by focusing on the institutional, economic and political levels and have tended to be socially determinist and neglected the role of agency (and therefore the possibilities of change) in relation to both the victims and the perpetrators of racism (another polarity assumed in the discourse of anti-racism). By working too much with fixed racial categories, particularly the binaries of ‘black’ and ‘white’, such politics have tended to reify racialised categories. By being too tied to the ‘anti’, anti-racisms have generally neglected thinking through the goal of building a more just and fair society for all. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, has been critiqued as embedded in fixed and static notions of culture and recently contrasted with a more reflexive or critical multiculturalism (see May 1999; Rattansi 1999; Parekh 2000). This recognises both the fluid nature of cultural identities as well as their location within racialised social structures and specific social sites.
