ABSTRACT
The diversity of anti-racism means that it can appear to be in retreat and advancing at one and the same time. While one tradition is being overlooked and forgotten, another is likely to be gathering momentum. Unfortunately, anti-racist debate rarely takes its own plurality into account. A prime example of this myopia is the tendency to construe anti-racism as experiencing either boom or bust. Notions that anti-racism can be adequately summarised at any one time as ‘in crisis’, ‘winning the day’, or ‘coming to an end’, are usually misleading. As this implies, the anti-racist dilemmas I shall be addressing here are not offered as problems that must be solved in order for anti-racism to survive. Indeed, the tensions described might better be portrayed as part of the life blood of anti-racism; they animate its debate and provoke the heterogeneity of its activism.
